Kafka: topics, partitions, offsets; producers/consumers; consumer groups; brokers; replication; retention. At-least-once vs exactly-once. Partition key for ordering. Rebalance on consumer join/leave. Offset management: auto vs manual commit. Use for: event streaming, log aggregation, activity tracking. **Why it matters**: Design choices compound at scale—wrong approach can cause 100× overhead. **Scalability trade-offs**: Profile before optimizing; validate on sample then full....
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