Brokers

Kafka Brokers

So far we have talked about events, topics, and partitions, but as of yet, we have not been too explicit about the actual computers in the picture. From a physical infrastructure standpoint, Apache Kafka is composed of a network of machines called brokers. In a contemporary deployment, these may not be separate physical servers but containers running on pods running on virtualized servers running on actual processors in a physical datacenter somewhere. However they are deployed, they are independent machines each running the Kafka broker process. Each broker hosts some set of partitions and handles incoming requests to write new events to those partitions or read events from them. Brokers also handle replication of partitions between each other.