Kafka Levers

Kafka provides many levers to adjust the way it operates depending on the application’s needs.

Tuning levers

The levers should be tuned carefully depending on requirements around availability, durability, and performance. For example, the user can control:

• The replication factor of a topic
• The minimum size of the ISR set (min.insync.replicas)
• The number of replicas from the ISR set that needs to acknowledge a record before it’s committed (acks)

Trade-offs

Let’s discuss some of the trade-offs of Kafka one can make using the above values.