Apache Kafka - From Zero to Production Ready

📌 Remember: This module is written to take you from zero knowledge to confidently working with Kafka. Every concept builds on the one before it. Read in order, run every command yourself, and do not skip the hands-on labs.

• Why Kafka exists and what problem it actually solves
• How Kafka is structured — brokers, topics, partitions, offsets
• How producers send messages and how consumers read them
• How consumer groups share work and handle failures
• How data is serialised and deserialised in Kafka
• How to install Kafka in modern KRaft mode (no ZooKeeper)
• How to run every important CLI command with confidence
• How to connect Python to Kafka and build a working producer and consumer
• How Kafka fits into larger systems like Apache Storm and Apache Spark
• How to set up a full hands-on project simulating a real microservices system
• How to answer the most common Kafka interview questions

In any modern system, services need to talk to each other constantly. An order placed on an e-commerce platform needs to trigger inventory updates, send a notification, log the event, and update analytics — all at the same time. If you wire these services together directly, one slow or crashed service brings everything down.

Kafka sits in the middle. Services drop messages into Kafka and move on immediately. Other services pick up those messages whenever they are ready. The sender and receiver never need to know about each other. This is what makes large-scale systems reliable, fast, and easy to scale.

As a DevOps engineer you will deploy Kafka clusters, monitor consumer lag, tune producer settings, manage topics, and debug pipeline failures. This module covers everything you need.