This chapter describes what Kafka is and the concepts related to this technology: brokers, topics, producers, and consumers. It also talks about how to build a simple producer and consumer from the command line, as well as how to install Confluent Platform. The information in this chapter is fundamental to the following chapters.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Kafka in a nutshell
- Installing Kafka (Linux and macOS)
- Installing the Confluent Platform
- Running Kafka
- Running Confluent Platform
- Running Kafka brokers
- Running Kafka topics
- A command–line message producer
- A command–line message consumer
- Using kafkacat
