Kafka

Kafka protocol practical guide

I worked with the Apache Kafka protocol on the low level quite a bit. It wasn’t easy to start doing this following the official guide only and I read the code a lot. With this post, I want to give you a head start by guiding you step by step from primitive values to meaningful requests.

In this post:

  1. Explore the Kafka protocol code and the protocol in action with Wireshark.
  2. Learn how to read and write primitive values.
  3. Combine primitives to perform meaningful requests.

We will use Python as the programming language. However, the code will be zero-dependency and easily portable to the language of your choice.