Kafka Producers and Consumers are key components of Kafka’s messaging system.
A Kafka Producer is an application or process that publishes messages to a Kafka topic. Producers can send messages to one or more Kafka topics, and they can also specify which partition within a topic to write messages to. Producers can be designed to send messages synchronously or asynchronously. Synchronous producers wait for a response from the broker before sending the next message, while asynchronous producers continue to send messages without waiting for a response.
A Kafka Consumer is an application or process that subscribes to one or more Kafka topics and reads messages from them. Consumers can read messages from one or more partitions within a topic, and they can be designed to read messages either sequentially or in parallel. Consumers can also specify which offset to start reading from, allowing them to read only new messages or to read messages from a specific point in time.
Kafka Consumers can be organized into Consumer Groups, which allows multiple consumers to work together to consume messages from one or more Kafka topics. Consumers within a group are assigned to different partitions within a topic, allowing them to work on different parts of the topic in parallel. Kafka uses a mechanism called rebalancing to automatically assign partitions to consumers within a group and ensure that each partition is assigned to only one consumer at a time.
Overall, Kafka Producers and Consumers are key components of Kafka’s messaging system and are used to publish and consume messages from Kafka topics.