Learn By Doing: Beginner's Guide to Apache Kafka - Foundations and Development

This introductory course provides a comprehensive overview of Apache Kafka aimed at beginners in the field of data streaming and real-time analytics. Participants will gain a solid understanding of Kafka’s fundamental concepts, architecture, and basic development practices. Through a mix of theoretical instruction and hands-on labs,learners will explore the fundamentals of Kafka, including setting up Kafka clusters and building simple producers and consumers to handle data streams. The course is ideal for software developers, data engineers, and IT professionals looking to harness the power of Kafka for scalable and reliable data processing.

Course Highlights:

1. Introduction to Apache Kafka

• Introduction to Apache Kafka as a distributed streaming platform
• Explanation of Kafka’s role in real-time data pipelines and streaming applications
• Overview of Kafka’s key features: scalability, fault tolerance, and high throughput

2. Understanding Kafka Components and Architecture

• Introduction to Kafka’s fundamental components: brokers, producers, consumers, topics, partitions
• Detailed explanation of Kafka’s architecture
• Role of brokers, leader and follower replicas
• How Kafka achieves fault tolerance through replication

3. Kafka Producers and Consumers

• Overview of Kafka producers and consumers in the Kafka ecosystem
• Explanation of how producers send data to Kafka topics
• Understanding of how consumers read data from topics

4. Basics of Kafka Topics and Partitions

• Understanding Kafka topics and their role in message categorization
• Explanation of partitions for distributing load and ensuring scalability

5. Setting Up a Kafka Environment

• Step-by-step guide to setting up a Kafka environment
• Installation and basic configuration of Kafka and ZooKeeper

6. Developing with Kafka: Producers

• How to write Kafka producers using the Java and Python
• Creating producer configurations, sending messages, and handling errors

7. Developing with Kafka: Consumers

• Writing Kafka consumers using the Java and Python
• Configuring consumers, reading messages, and managing offsets