Partitions in Apache Kafka®

A partition is a sequence of topic messages stored in the order they are received.

The message sequence number is called an offset.

Consumers read messages from the beginning to the end of a partition: messages received earlier are consumed first. Consumers must pass the broker its offset to start reading data from a specific message.

Partitions allow you to:

• Distribute the message storage and request processing load among multiple brokers.

• Provide fault tolerance: a partition can be replicated to a specified number of brokers.

See also

For more information, see the official Apache Kafka® documentation .