What are Kafka topics, partitions, and offsets?
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Quick Answer
A topic is a named log split into partitions; each message in a partition has a monotonically increasing offset.
Detailed Answer
Producers append to partitions; ordering is guaranteed only within a partition. Partitions enable parallelism and are distributed across brokers. Consumers track their position by committing offsets, so they can resume where they left off. Partition count sets the max consumer parallelism per group.
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Interview Tip
Ordering is per-partition, not per-topic — a key point.
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