1. Brokers: A Kafka cluster consists of one or more servers (Kafka brokers) running Kafka. Each broker is identified by its id, and it contains certain topic partitions. For example, a broker with id 1 may contain topic partitions 0 and 1.
2. Topics: A topic is a category or feed name to which messages are published. For example, a topic can be a user activity log or a financial transaction log.
3. Producers: Producers are processes that publish data to topics. For example, a producer may publish a user purchase event to a topic called “user_purchases”.
4. Consumers: Consumers are processes that subscribe to topics and process the published messages. For example, a consumer may subscribe to the “user_purchases” topic and process each message to update the user’s profile in the database.
5. Zookeeper: Apache Zookeeper is a distributed coordination service that helps maintain configuration information and provide synchronization across the cluster. It is used by Kafka to manage the cluster.