Kafka Topic Administration: Configuration, Scalability, and Security

Duration: 14 Hours (2 Intensive Days) Focus: Hands-on Topic Lifecycle Management and Production Operations


Day 1: Topic Fundamentals and Lifecycle Management 🛠️

Module 1: Introduction to Kafka and Topic Architecture

  • Overview of Apache Kafka (Architecture, producers, consumers, brokers, and its role in stream processing).
  • Kafka Topic Fundamentals (Definition of a topic, partition concept, and offset management).
  • Use Cases for Kafka topics (Message queues, stream processing, decoupled systems, event sourcing).

Module 2: Topic Creation and Management

  • Creating Topics (Using Kafka command-line tools (kafka-topics.sh) to create topics).
  • Topic Configuration (Setting crucial topic properties during creation: replication factor, number of partitions).
  • Topic Modification (Using command-line tools to modify existing topic properties (e.g., adding partitions)).
  • Topic Deletion (Safely deleting topics and understanding configuration flags).

Module 3: Security and Access Control

  • Security Overview (Overview of Kafka security features).
  • Secure Communication (Configuring SSL or TLS for secure communication between brokers, producers, and consumers).
  • Authentication (Setting up authentication mechanisms (e.g., SASL)).
  • Authorization (ACLs) (Configuring fine-grained authorization (Access Control Lists) for topics).

Module 4: High Availability and Disaster Recovery

  • Replication for HA (Ensuring high availability with replication factor settings and understanding in-sync replicas (ISRs)).
  • Disaster Recovery Strategies (Implementing cross-cluster replication (e.g., MirrorMaker) for Disaster recovery).
  • Failover Handling (Monitoring and handling failover events and ensuring data recovery).

Day 2: Performance, Maintenance, and Advanced Topics 📈

Module 5: Monitoring Topic Health and Performance

  • Monitoring Importance (Understanding the importance of monitoring Kafka topics).
  • Key Metrics (Identifying critical metrics (latency, throughput, consumer lag) and available monitoring tools (e.g., JMX, Prometheus/Grafana)).
  • Topic Health Check (Monitoring topic health and performance indicators).

Module 6: Scaling and Performance Tuning

  • Scaling Strategies (Methods for scaling Kafka topics by adjusting partitions and cluster size).
  • Performance Tuning Techniques (Optimizing broker and topic settings for low latency or high throughput).
  • Partition Management (Adding partitions dynamically and understanding the impact on consumers).

Module 7: Data Retention and Cleanup

  • Retention Policies (Configuring retention policies based on time and size (log.retention.hours, log.retention.bytes)).
  • Disk Space Management (Strategies for managing disk space usage).
  • Cleanup Methods (Data cleanup using deletion and log compaction (log.cleanup.policy=compact)).

Module 8: Best Practices and Future Trends

  • Topic Administration Best Practices (Recommended naming conventions, partition sizing, and monitoring setup).
  • Advanced Management (Advanced topic management techniques (e.g., preferred leader election, reassigning partitions)).
  • Use Case Considerations (Tailoring topic setup to use case-specific considerations (e.g., stream processing vs. messaging)).
  • Future Outlook (Review of Future trends and developments in Kafka topic administration (e.g., Tiered Storage)).