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What is the role of a partition in Kafka, and how does it impact scalability?

SQLmedium0.5 min readPremium
Frequency
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Asked at 1 company
Category
487
questions in SQL
Difficulty Split
130E|271M|86H
in this category
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1,863
across 7 categories
Asked at these companies
Citi
Key Concepts Tested
partition
Expert AnswerPremium
94 wordsInterview-ready
Kafka partition: Ordered log shard within a topic. Messages with same key go to same partition. Role in scalability: (1) Parallelism—consumers read partitions in parallel. (2) Ordering—per partition. (3) Throughput—more partitions = more producers/consumers. (4) Consumer scaling—max consumers = partition count. Trade-off: More partitions = more broker metadata and files. Best practice: Partition count ≥ max consumers; use keys for ordering when needed....
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