Apache Kafka

A high-throughput distributed messaging system.

download Kafka 0.9.0 Documentation

introduction
uses 1. Getting Started
documentation
quickstart
1.1 Introduction
performance
clients
Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging
ecosystem
faq system, but with a unique design.
project
twitter What does all that mean?
wiki
bugs First let's review some basic messaging terminology:
mailing lists
committers Kafka maintains feeds of messages in categories called topics.
powered by We'll call processes that publish messages to a Kafka topic producers.
papers & talks We'll call processes that subscribe to topics and process the feed of published messages consumers..
developers
Kafka is run as a cluster comprised of one or more servers each of which is called a broker.
code
projects
So, at a high level, producers send messages over the network to the Kafka cluster which in turn serves them
contributing
coding guide up to consumers like this:
unit tests

Communication between the clients and the servers is done with a simple, high-performance, language
agnostic TCP protocol. We provide a Java client for Kafka, but clients are available in many languages.

Topics and Logs

Let's first dive into the high-level abstraction Kafka provides—the topic.

A topic is a category or feed name to which messages are published. For each topic, the Kafka cluster
maintains a partitioned log that looks like this:
Each partition is an ordered, immutable sequence of messages that is continually appended to—a commit log.
The messages in the partitions are each assigned a sequential id number called the offset that uniquely
identifies each message within the partition.

The Kafka cluster retains all published messages—whether or not they have been consumed—for a
configurable period of time. For example if the log retention is set to two days, then for the two days after a
message is published it is available for consumption, after which it will be discarded to free up space. Kafka's
performance is effectively constant with respect to data size so retaining lots of data is not a problem.

In fact the only metadata retained on a per-consumer basis is the position of the consumer in the log, called
the "offset". This offset is controlled by the consumer: normally a consumer will advance its offset linearly as it
reads messages, but in fact the position is controlled by the consumer and it can consume messages in any
order it likes. For example a consumer can reset to an older offset to reprocess.

This combination of features means that Kafka consumers are very cheap—they can come and go without
much impact on the cluster or on other consumers. For example, you can use our command line tools to "tail"
the contents of any topic without changing what is consumed by any existing consumers.

The partitions in the log serve several purposes. First, they allow the log to scale beyond a size that will fit on a
single server. Each individual partition must fit on the servers that host it, but a topic may have many
partitions so it can handle an arbitrary amount of data. Second they act as the unit of parallelism—more on
that in a bit.

Distribution

The partitions of the log are distributed over the servers in the Kafka cluster with each server handling data
and requests for a share of the partitions. Each partition is replicated across a configurable number of servers
for fault tolerance.

Each partition has one server which acts as the "leader" and zero or more servers which act as "followers". The
leader handles all read and write requests for the partition while the followers passively replicate the leader. If
the leader fails, one of the followers will automatically become the new leader. Each server acts as a leader for
some of its partitions and a follower for others so load is well balanced within the cluster.

Producers

Producers publish data to the topics of their choice. The producer is responsible for choosing which message
to assign to which partition within the topic. This can be done in a round-robin fashion simply to balance load
or it can be done according to some semantic partition function (say based on some key in the message). More
on the use of partitioning in a second.

Consumers

Messaging traditionally has two models: queuing and publish-subscribe. In a queue, a pool of consumers may
read from a server and each message goes to one of them; in publish-subscribe the message is broadcast to all
consumers. Kafka offers a single consumer abstraction that generalizes both of these—the consumer group.

Consumers label themselves with a consumer group name, and each message published to a topic is delivered
to one consumer instance within each subscribing consumer group. Consumer instances can be in separate
processes or on separate machines.

If all the consumer instances have the same consumer group, then this works just like a traditional queue
balancing load over the consumers.

If all the consumer instances have different consumer groups, then this works like publish-subscribe and all
messages are broadcast to all consumers.

More commonly, however, we have found that topics have a small number of consumer groups, one for each
"logical subscriber". Each group is composed of many consumer instances for scalability and fault tolerance.
This is nothing more than publish-subscribe semantics where the subscriber is cluster of consumers instead of
a single process.

Kafka has stronger ordering

guarantees than a traditional
messaging system, too.

A traditional queue retains

messages in-order on the server,
and if multiple consumers consume
from the queue then the server
hands out messages in the order
they are stored. However, although
the server hands out messages in A two server Kafka cluster hosting four partitions (P0-P3) with two consumer

order, the messages are delivered groups. Consumer group A has two consumer instances and group B has four.

asynchronously to consumers, so
they may arrive out of order on different consumers. This effectively means the ordering of the messages is lost
in the presence of parallel consumption. Messaging systems often work around this by having a notion of
"exclusive consumer" that allows only one process to consume from a queue, but of course this means that
there is no parallelism in processing.

Kafka does it better. By having a notion of parallelism—the partition—within the topics, Kafka is able to
provide both ordering guarantees and load balancing over a pool of consumer processes. This is achieved by
assigning the partitions in the topic to the consumers in the consumer group so that each partition is
consumed by exactly one consumer in the group. By doing this we ensure that the consumer is the only reader
of that partition and consumes the data in order. Since there are many partitions this still balances the load
over many consumer instances. Note however that there cannot be more consumer instances in a consumer
group than partitions.

Kafka only provides a total order over messages within a partition, not between different partitions in a topic.
Per-partition ordering combined with the ability to partition data by key is sufficient for most applications.
However, if you require a total order over messages this can be achieved with a topic that has only one
partition, though this will mean only one consumer process per consumer group.

Guarantees

At a high-level Kafka gives the following guarantees:

Messages sent by a producer to a particular topic partition will be appended in the order they are sent.
That is, if a message M1 is sent by the same producer as a message M2, and M1 is sent first, then M1 will
have a lower offset than M2 and appear earlier in the log.
A consumer instance sees messages in the order they are stored in the log.
For a topic with replication factor N, we will tolerate up to N-1 server failures without losing any
messages committed to the log.

More details on these guarantees are given in the design section of the documentation.

1.2 Use Cases

Here is a description of a few of the popular use cases for Apache Kafka. For an overview of a number of these
areas in action, see this blog post.

Messaging

Kafka works well as a replacement for a more traditional message broker. Message brokers are used for a
variety of reasons (to decouple processing from data producers, to buffer unprocessed messages, etc). In
comparison to most messaging systems Kafka has better throughput, built-in partitioning, replication, and
fault-tolerance which makes it a good solution for large scale message processing applications.

In our experience messaging uses are often comparatively low-throughput, but may require low end-to-end
latency and often depend on the strong durability guarantees Kafka provides.

In this domain Kafka is comparable to traditional messaging systems such as ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ.

Website Activity Tracking

The original use case for Kafka was to be able to rebuild a user activity tracking pipeline as a set of real-time
publish-subscribe feeds. This means site activity (page views, searches, or other actions users may take) is
published to central topics with one topic per activity type. These feeds are available for subscription for a
range of use cases including real-time processing, real-time monitoring, and loading into Hadoop or offline
data warehousing systems for offline processing and reporting.

Activity tracking is often very high volume as many activity messages are generated for each user page view.

Metrics

Kafka is often used for operational monitoring data. This involves aggregating statistics from distributed
applications to produce centralized feeds of operational data.

Log Aggregation
Many people use Kafka as a replacement for a log aggregation solution. Log aggregation typically collects
physical log files off servers and puts them in a central place (a file server or HDFS perhaps) for processing.
Kafka abstracts away the details of files and gives a cleaner abstraction of log or event data as a stream of
messages. This allows for lower-latency processing and easier support for multiple data sources and
distributed data consumption. In comparison to log-centric systems like Scribe or Flume, Kafka offers equally
good performance, stronger durability guarantees due to replication, and much lower end-to-end latency.

Stream Processing

Many users end up doing stage-wise processing of data where data is consumed from topics of raw data and
then aggregated, enriched, or otherwise transformed into new Kafka topics for further consumption. For
example a processing flow for article recommendation might crawl article content from RSS feeds and publish
it to an "articles" topic; further processing might help normalize or deduplicate this content to a topic of
cleaned article content; a final stage might attempt to match this content to users. This creates a graph of real-
time data flow out of the individual topics. Storm and Samza are popular frameworks for implementing these
kinds of transformations.

Event Sourcing

Event sourcing is a style of application design where state changes are logged as a time-ordered sequence of
records. Kafka's support for very large stored log data makes it an excellent backend for an application built in
this style.

Commit Log

Kafka can serve as a kind of external commit-log for a distributed system. The log helps replicate data between
nodes and acts as a re-syncing mechanism for failed nodes to restore their data. The log compaction feature in
Kafka helps support this usage. In this usage Kafka is similar to Apache BookKeeper project.