Kafkas arkitektur består af en klynge af brokers (servere), der gemmer partitionerede, replikerede emner, med producere, der skriver, og consumere, der læser, koordineret af metadatastyring (historisk ZooKeeper, nu KRaft). At forstå arkitekturen præciserer, hvordan Kafka fungerer som et distribueret system.
Komponenterne
BROKERS → Kafka SERVERS forming a CLUSTER:
→ store topic partitions (the data); serve producers and consumers
→ a cluster of multiple brokers → distributes data and load; scales horizontally
TOPICS / PARTITIONS → topics split into partitions, distributed across brokers
PRODUCERS → write events to topics (to partition leaders)
CONSUMERS (in groups) → read events from partitions
COORDINATION → metadata, cluster state, leader election:
→ historically ZOOKEEPER; now KRAFT (Kafka's own built-in consensus, removing ZooKeeper)
