Apache Kafka Practice

Messages in a Kafka topic are organized into partitions, which is fundamental to Kafka's architecture. Each topic can have multiple partitions, allowing Kafka to achieve horizontal scalability, increased throughput, and fault tolerance.

When a message is produced to a topic, it is appended to the end of one of the partitions. This sequential organization allows Kafka to efficiently write and read messages, benefiting from the speed of sequential disk access. Because each partition is an ordered, immutable sequence of records, Kafka can maintain the order of messages within a single partition, which is crucial for scenarios where the order of processing is important.

This partitioning strategy also enables parallelism; multiple consumers can read from different partitions simultaneously, increasing the overall processing speed. Additionally, each partition can be replicated across multiple brokers, enhancing availability and resilience.

The other options, such as storing messages in sequential files, organizing them into queues, or storing them in a single database table, do not accurately reflect how Kafka's architecture handles message organization in a scalable and efficient manner.