Learn Apache Kafka, from scratch to production.
Free Apache Kafka tutorials, hands-on labs, and production playbooks. From your first topic to running brokers under load. Patient, opinionated, and built by the team behind Conduktor. Read in any order, skip what you already know.
Where are you starting from?
Lessons
65
Sign-up
Not required
Cost
Free, forever
01
Understand it, do it, run it.
Most Kafka courses pick one of these. Ours runs all three in parallel, because you don't really know Kafka until you've broken it on your laptop.
01
Learn — Build the mental model
The vocabulary, the diagrams, the why. No setup, no Docker. Read on the train.
- ○ What is Apache Kafka?
- ○ Topics, partitions and offsets
- ○ Producers and consumers
- ○ Brokers and topic replication
- ○ KRaft and ZooKeeper
02
Practice — Get your hands dirty
Install Kafka on your laptop. Drive it from the CLI, then from Java.
- ○ Install Kafka on Mac, Linux or Docker
- ○ Manage topics from the CLI
- ○ Drive producers and consumers via CLI
- ○ Build a Java producer and consumer
- ○ Wire up a Maven or Gradle project
03
Master — Run it like you mean it
The settings that make or break an on-call shift. Tune, secure, monitor, scale.
- ○ Topic internals and log compaction
- ○ Producer acks, idempotence, batching
- ○ Consumer delivery semantics
- ○ Security, monitoring, multi-cluster
- ○ Min ISR and unclean leader election
Reference tool
Kafka Options Explorer
Compare Kafka configs across every version. Read KIPs, decode error codes, plan upgrades.
- Compare broker, producer, consumer and connect configs side by side
- Browse every KIP with summaries and status
- Generate upgrade reports between any two versions
- Look up error codes and wire protocol changes