ThinkerQAQ

NOTE

Kafka Usage Guide

A compact Kafka workflow for topics, producers, consumers, groups, offsets, and administration without freezing the note to one old CLI syntax.

Message QueuesCreated Updated 1 min readhistorical

This is a historical learning note and may contain outdated or incomplete understanding.

1. Basic Workflow

A minimal Kafka workflow is:

  1. create/configure a topic;
  2. produce keyed or unkeyed records;
  3. consume through a consumer group;
  4. inspect group lag and committed offsets;
  5. adjust partitions/retention only with an understanding of the semantic impact.

2. Topic Operations

Administrative tools can create, describe, alter, and delete topics.

Important topic properties include:

  • partition count;
  • replication factor;
  • retention;
  • cleanup policy (delete, compact, or both);
  • message-size limits.

Increasing partition count changes future key-to-partition mapping for common partitioners, so do not treat it as a purely operational change for keyed ordering.

3. Producers

Production code should configure serializers, acknowledgement/idempotence behavior, batching/compression, retries, and delivery/error callbacks explicitly.

4. Consumers

Consumers should use stable group.id values, understand auto-offset-reset behavior, and choose an offset commit strategy tied to actual processing semantics.

Monitor consumer lag as a first-class signal.

5. CLI Commands Are Version-Sensitive

Kafka CLI flags and script names have changed over releases. Use this note for the workflow model and consult the command help/documentation packaged with the deployed Kafka version for exact syntax.