How do Producers and Consumers work in Kafka?

In Kafka, the Producer and Consumer are two types of client applications that serve as different roles for sending messages to and consuming messages from the Kafka cluster.

The Producer is responsible for sending messages to one or more topics in the Kafka cluster. It can send messages synchronously or asynchronously. When the Producer sends a message, it publishes it to the specified topic and distributes it to different partitions using Kafka’s partitioning mechanism. The Producer also handles any errors that may occur during the sending process and retries if necessary.

Consumers are responsible for subscribing to one or more topics from a Kafka cluster and consuming messages from those topics. Consumers can consume messages in different ways, such as starting from the latest message, starting from the earliest message, or starting from a specific offset. By subscribing to specified topics, consumers pull messages from the Kafka cluster and process them.

Communication between producers and consumers is facilitated through a Kafka cluster. Producers send messages to Kafka broker nodes, while consumers pull messages from the broker nodes for consumption. The Kafka cluster is responsible for managing the storage and distribution of messages, ensuring that messages are securely stored and delivered to consumers.

In summary, the Producer is responsible for sending messages to Kafka, while the Consumer is responsible for consuming messages from Kafka, with both working together to form the core functionality of the Kafka messaging system.