Kafka 101

Explains offsets, partitions, and rebalances with a runnable example that shows how consumption is split across consumers and what happens when scaling or failures occur.

Kafka CLI first steps: create topics, produce events, and consume them from console in a reproducible local environment. Perfect for practice without cloud dependencies.

Connect local Kafka to Spark Structured Streaming, define a schema, and run a continuous read. Includes simple metrics and validations to confirm the stream is working.