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Distributed Systems for Practitioners

Kafka Levers

Explore how to adjust Kafka's main configuration levers such as replication factor, min.insync.replicas, and acks to optimize message durability, availability, and performance. Understand the trade-offs involved in each setting and their impact on system behavior.

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Kafka provides many levers to adjust the way it operates depending on the application’s needs.

Tuning levers

The levers should be tuned carefully depending on requirements around availability, durability, and performance. For example, the user can control:

  • The replication factor of a topic
  • The minimum size of the ISR set (min.insync.replicas)
  • The number of replicas from the ISR set that needs to acknowledge a record before it’s committed (acks)

Trade-offs

Let’s discuss some of the trade-offs of Kafka one can make using the above values.

  • Setting min.insync.replicas to a majority quorum (e.g. (replicationfactor/2)+1)(replication factor / 2) + 1) and acksacks ...