Build Kafka (13 scenes)
Scene 01
Foundations — what Kafka is, words you'll hear
Kafka is a durable, replayable event log. Producers append; brokers store; consumers read at their own pace; partitions parallelize; replicas survive failures.
Scene 01
Foundations — what Kafka is, words you'll hear
- Watch
- Try it
- Predict
- Capture
What to watch for
A quick three-beat tour. The problem first, then the architecture, then the eight words you'll need for the rest of the curriculum.
Continue unlocks when the animation finishes.
Where this sits in Build Kafka
Scene 01 of 13, in the Why a log? act — Orientation — the log is the database, not a queue.. Why Kafka exists and the seven core nouns (producer, broker, topic, partition, record, offset, consumer). Orientation before you touch anything.
Up next. Hello Kafka — meet a real topic with partitions spread across brokers, and watch a single record's journey from producer call to consumer poll.
Designs that use this
- Twitter / X TimelinePush or pull? Both. The canonical fanout problem.
- Uber / Lyft — Match Drivers and RidersMatch a rider to the closest acceptable driver in under 3 s. Geohash, S2, surge.
- Slack / DiscordChannels and history. Push or pull — and how a hot-channel fanout doesn't melt the gateway.
- WhatsApp / MessengerHundreds of millions of long-lived sockets, sub-second 1:1 + group delivery, E2E-encrypted, multi-device, multi-region active-active.
Every scene in Build Kafka builds on the one before it.All 13 Build Kafka scenes