Day 41: Mastering Kafka Partitioning & Consumer Groups
Building Ultra-Scalable Log Processing with Parallel Consumer Architecture
254-Day Hands-On System Design Series
Module 2: Scalable Log Processing | Week 6: Stream Processing with Kafka
🎯 What We're Building Today
📊 6-Partition Kafka Topic
🚀 Smart Log Producer
👥 3-Consumer Group System
📈 Real-Time Monitoring Dashboard
⚡ Parallel Processing
🔄 Auto-Rebalancing
📊 Production Monitoring
The Scale Challenge That Changed Everything
Netflix processes over 500 billion events per day through their log streaming infrastructure. A single Kafka consumer processing logs sequentially would take approximately 63 years to handle one day's traffic. This impossibility drove the creation of Kafka's partitioning and consumer group architecture - the same patterns you'll master today.
When Uber's real-time pricing system couldn't keep up with demand spikes, they solved it not by adding more hardware, but by implementing intelligent partitioning strategies that distributed processing load across consumer groups.
Understanding Kafka Partitioning: The Foundation of Scale
Kafka partitioning transforms a single overwhelming data stream into multiple manageable parallel channels. Think of it as converting a single-lane highway into a multi-lane expressway where each lane handles traffic independently.