The Producer API: Configuration and Best Practices

There are lots of configuration parameters for the Kafka Producer API using which we can tune our applications as per requirements. The performance and reliability of our Kafka Producer applications depend a lot on how we configure these parameters. Let’s explore some of the most important ones. In the process, we will also cover some of the best practices of the Producer API.

Common configurations

Let’s take a look at some of the commonly used Producer API configurations.

The bootstrap.servers configuration

This is simply a comma-separated list of Kafka broker addresses that the producer should use to establish an initial connection. For example, we use localhost:9092 as the value in this case.

The acks configuration

This specifies the number of acknowledgments a producer must receive from brokers before considering a message as sent. The value of acks can be set to 0, 1, or all, with each value representing a different level of acknowledgment.

• When set to 0, the producer does not wait for any acknowledgment from the broker and assumes the message has been sent successfully.

• Setting it to 1 requires the producer to receive an acknowledgment from the leader broker.

• Setting it to all requires acknowledgment from all in-sync replicas.

The acks configuration property provides control over the trade-off between message durability and throughput, as higher acknowledgment levels can slow down message production, but ensure better data consistency.

The enable.idempotence configuration

This ensures that messages sent from the producer to a Kafka broker are delivered exactly once, even during failures. When set to true, the producer assigns a unique identifier to each message and uses it to prevent duplicate messages from ...