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Course contents
4 parts · 39 chaptersBeginner to advancedFree

Apache Kafka: from zero to senior

One course in four parts: foundations, Spring Boot, interview practice, and advanced design. Written for Kafka 4, Spring Boot 4 and Spring Kafka 4.

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39chapters
44diagrams
81tested code examples
181interview answers
The curriculum

What you will learn

01Kafka Foundations: learn it from scratchBeginner, 13 chapters

Learn it from scratch, in plain words, one idea at a time.

Start this part
  1. 01Why Kafka exists
  2. 02The log: topics, partitions and offsets
  3. 03Brokers, replication and the cluster
  4. 04Producers: the journey of a message
  5. 05Consumers and consumer groups
  6. 06Delivery guarantees
  7. 07Storage, retention and why Kafka is fast
  8. 08Offsets in depth: position, commit, lag and gaps
  9. 09Serialization and schemas
  10. 10Handling failures: retries, DLQ and poison pills
  11. 11The Kafka ecosystem
  12. 12Operating Kafka: commands, monitoring and security
  13. 13Consumer groups under the hood
02Kafka with Spring Boot: build it reliablyIntermediate, 10 chapters

Build producers and consumers you can trust in production.

Start this part
  1. 01Your first producer and consumer in Spring Boot
  2. 02What runs behind @KafkaListener
  3. 03Order of messages
  4. 04Acknowledgements
  5. 05When processing fails: retries and dead-letter topics
  6. 06Preventing duplicate messages
  7. 07Maximum message size
  8. 08Recovering messages when processing failed
  9. 09A slow consumer: the "50 messages per second" scenario
  10. 10Batch processing and acknowledgement
03Kafka interview questions, rankedIntermediate, 6 chapters

Ranked by how often they come up, with model answers you can say aloud.

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  1. 01How to use this question bank
  2. 02Tier 1: the ones you must nail
  3. 03Tier 2: very common
  4. 04Tier 3: separate good from great
  5. 05Scenario drills
  6. 06Cheat sheets
04Advanced Kafka: Streams, Connect, internals and designAdvanced, 10 chapters

Streams, Connect and the broker from the inside, to design real systems.

Start this part
  1. 01Kafka Streams in depth
  2. 02Kafka Connect in depth
  3. 03Inside the broker
  4. 04Advanced producer and consumer code
  5. 05Advanced Spring Kafka
  6. 06Testing Kafka applications
  7. 07Architecture patterns with Kafka
  8. 08Capacity planning and sizing
  9. 09Operations: restarts, upgrades, reassignment and client security
  10. 10Putting it together: end-to-end design answers