01 / 5·FoundationsDistributed Systems
Why Kafka Exists
What problem Kafka solves — durable logs, decoupled services, and replay — and when a simple HTTP call is still the right answer.
02 / 5·FoundationsDistributed Systems
Kafka Core Vocabulary — Broker, Topic, Partition, Offset
Follow one OrderPlaced event from write to read — broker, topic, partition, and offset in plain English, with interactives.
03 / 5·Hands-onDistributed Systems
Your First Kafka Producer and Consumer
Docker up, one topic, one OrderPlaced message — produce, consume, then watch the log survive when the consumer is down.
04 / 5·Hands-onDistributed Systems
Kafka Consumer Groups & Replay
Two teams read the same OrderPlaced events without stealing — then reset an offset and fix a bad stock reservation from the log.
05 / 5·OperationsDistributed Systems
The Deploy Paused Inventory. Orders Piled Up.
Inventory went green. Checkout never stopped. Two hundred orders were already in the log, and nobody had read them.