Components of Kafka

Let’s discuss the various components:

Message

A message is simply an array of bytes from Kafka’s perspective. It doesn’t assign any meaning or interpretation to the contents of the message. A message is also the unit of data in the Kafka ecosystem. It is akin to a row or record in a table in a relational database.

• Messages are batched rather than being sent individually to reduce overhead. This leads to the classical tradeoff between latency and throughput. As batch sizes grow larger, throughput increases as more messages are handled per unit of time. At the same time, it takes longer for an individual message to be delivered thus increasing latency.
• Messages batched together are compressed for efficient data transfer.