The Leader and Follower roles in Kafka?

10 months ago

Isabella Edwards

2 minutes

In Kafka, the roles of Leader and Follower refer to the distinctions between different replica roles in a Kafka cluster.

In a Kafka cluster, each partition has a Leader replica responsible for handling all read and write requests for that partition. The Leader is in charge of writing messages to the partition and processing consumer read requests, while also synchronizing data to all Follower replicas. The Leader replica has the most up-to-date data and is the only replica available for writing and reading data.
A Follower copy is a backup of the Leader copy, responsible for replicating the data of the Leader copy and taking over its role when the Leader copy fails. The Follower copy will copy data from the Leader copy to maintain consistency. It usually remains in a passive state and only participates in data processing and writing when the Leader copy fails.

In general, the Leader is responsible for handling read and write requests, maintaining data consistency, while the Follower is responsible for replicating data and backing up Leader copies. In a Kafka cluster, the division of labor between Leader and Follower roles ensures high reliability and availability of data.