Kafka & Event Streaming

Kafka is a log-shaped distributed system, not a magic message bus. This pillar covers broker/partition mental models, delivery guarantees, ordering limits, Streams introduction, and how exactly-once relates to practical idempotent consumers.

Audience: Engineers designing event-driven backends or integrating Kafka with Spring.

Curriculum

1. Message Queues — Hand Work Off Without Blocking the User
2. Kafka Architecture — Brokers, Partitions, ISR, and Consumers
3. Kafka Partition Ordering and Delivery Guarantees
4. Kafka Exactly-Once Semantics — What Is Actually Guaranteed
5. Exactly-Once Processing vs Practical Deduplication
6. Kafka Streams Introduction
7. Transactional Outbox and Saga Patterns — Reliable Multi-Step Work
8. Kafka with Spring Boot Code Walkthrough

By Shubham Jain. Last reviewed 2026-07-15.

Shubham Jain · Learning Lab