Basic Terminology

The following terminology is used heavily in this library, documentation, and code comments:

• Topic - feeds of messages in categories
• Partition - Divides topics, for consumption, load balancing, etc. Each partition may exist on a separate machine, or the same machine. Multiple consumers may read from multiple partitions.
• Offset - A position in a particular topic partition, used on a per-consumer basis
• Partitioner/Partition Strategy - How data will be distributed within Kafka.
• Consumer Group - a logical grouping of consumers, used to implement queuing and publish-subscribe semantics, depending on the consumer.
• Assignment - The topic, partition, and offset a consumer is assgined to
• Consumer Rebalance - Occurs when consumers come to a consensus on which consumer is consuming which partitions. Triggered on each addition or removal of both broker nodes and other consumers within the same consumer group.
• Broker - A node in a Kafka cluster. These will be specified in your connection parameters when you use a producer, consumer, or other APIs that need to interact with the Kafka cluster.
• Producer - processes that publishes message.
• Consumer - process that consumes a message.
• Producer Record - a message that will be sent by the producer to a topic.
• Consumer Record - a message that will be returned to a consumer from a topic.
• Topic Partition - a logical grouping of a topic and any valid partition.
• Leader - each partition has one server that acts as the leader, and zero or more servers as followers.