Which Version of Kafka Does the Baidu Messaging System Support?

Kafka is an evolving system. Please select version 0.10.1.1 for the client.

What Is a Topic? Do I Have to Create One?

You need to create one first before you read and write. The topic is globally unique.

What Is a Partition?

A partition is designed for Kafka to expand the topic throughput horizontally. In this way, the published messages are written into different partitions and read by multiple consumers simultaneously. In nature, the throughput of a topic is proportional to the number of partitions.

The throughput includes producers and consumers, so the formula for calculating the number of partitions is max (t/p, t/c), where t, p and c respectively represent the expected total throughput, the throughput of producers in a partition and the throughput of consumers in a partition.

Because messages are cached in Kafka in queue, the number of partitions needs to be set up according to the average value, rather than the peak value. Of course, its disadvantage is that the delay may be increased.

What Is a Client?

You can connect to the message center through the Kafka client and deploy the code to multiple Baidu Cloud Compute (BCC) or Baidu Application Engine (BAE) instances to create or consume messages.