Brokers in Apache Kafka®

A broker is a Managed Service for Apache Kafka® cluster host containing topics and partitions.

Topic partitions store messages that producers and consumers work with. Brokers can share different topics by partitions.

A broker performs the following functions:

  • Accepts connections from clients.

  • Provides clients with information about topics, partitions, and other brokers in the cluster.

  • Receives requests to read and write messages from clients.

  • Stores messages.

  • Participates in partition replication.

Each replicated partition has a leader broker accepting read and write requests and several follower brokers replicating the leader data. The number of followers depends on the replication factor (the number indicating the quantity of partition data replicas a cluster should have).

For example:

  • If the replication factor is 1, a partition will have no followers.

  • If 2, it will have one follower.

  • If 3, two followers.

  • And so on.

See also

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

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