A broker facilitates transactions between buyers and sellers.
What is a kafka broker facilitating?
Kafka broker is facilitating event transactions between the producers and consumers. One component produces events, another component consumes events, second component produces more events, some other component consumes these events. Kafka broker instances are the ones who are actually facilitating these event transfers.
From a physical standpoint, kafka is composed of a network of machines called brokers. These machines do not have to be bare metal physical machines, they can be container instances running or virtual machines or just processes.
What does a broker do
- It handles a set of incoming partitions
- Handles write events to these partitions
- Handles read events from these partitions
- Handles replication across partitions.
Broker is kept confined to the above responsibilities alone. Simplicity and immutability are some of the strengths of the kafka design.
