Replication

Kafka Topic Architecture - 2025 Edition

🚀 What’s New in This 2025 Update

Major Updates and Changes

• KRaft-Based Metadata Management - Direct partition control without ZooKeeper
• Raft Consensus for Leader Election - Deterministic, fast failover
• Enhanced ISR Management - Real-time replica state tracking
• Faster Topic Operations - Reduced metadata propagation delays
• Improved Partition Assignment - Efficient rebalancing strategies
• Centralized Controller - Single source of truth for metadata

Deprecated Features

• ❌ ZooKeeper-based leader election - Replaced by Raft
• ❌ Legacy metadata management - KRaft is mandatory
• ❌ Old partition reassignment tools - Updated for KRaft

Ready to master the backbone of Kafka’s scalability? Let’s explore how topics and partitions power distributed streaming.

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Kafka Topic Architecture

Kafka Topic Architecture - Replication, Failover and Parallel Processing

This article covers some lower level details of Kafka topic architecture. It is a continuation of the Kafka Architecture article.

This article covers Kafka Topic’s Architecture with a discussion of how partitions are used for fail-over and parallel processing.

Kafka Topics, Logs, Partitions

Recall that a Kafka topic is a named stream of records. Kafka stores topics in logs. A topic log is broken up into partitions. Kafka spreads log’s partitions across multiple servers or disks. Think of a topic as a category, stream name or feed.

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