How to Set Up Kafka On Your Windows – Step-By-Step Guide

Kafka is a messaging system built on top of the Apache Kafka community project. It provides you with a simple way to store and process messages from your applications or websites over TCP/IP networks.

Also, it’s also the internet’s fastest production-grade message-retention system, which means it will keep your data safe and your backend servers productive even if your internet connection goes down.

Here’s how to set up Kafka on your Windows computer:

What is Apache Kafka?

Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed messaging system that’s designed to work with the speed and low latency of a TCP/IP network, without the need for a middleman like an ISP or cloud platform.

It’s built on top of the popular Apache Software Foundation project and is maintained and supported by the community, which includes more than 800 developers and 60,000 users.

What Can You Store In Kafka?

You can store pretty much anything in Kafka, as the name suggests. But before we get into what that could be, let’s take a look at what’s already in there.

Kafka includes a message store to hold your messages, an acknowledgment store to hold back messages until all your nodes have acknowledged them, and a topic store to hold the data that your readers and writers are consuming from or generating.

All in all, it’s designed to be very flexible, and you can store almost anything you want in it!

How to Set Up Kafka On Your Windows – Step By Step

Download the Kafka binaries from a mirror site:

Kafka comes with a set of binaries that you can download and unpack into a folder of your choosing to set up your cluster.

There are numerous mirror sites that provide these binaries in various formats. One such mirror site is https://kafka.apache.org/downloads. Just click the “Download ZIP” button to get everything you need.

We suggest you to use a to use Windows VPN to securely download the binary files. Also, some of the mirror sites aren’t available in all countries, so you should use a VPN to make it accessible to you!

How to set up a simple Kafka cluster

To set up a simple Kafka cluster, all you have to do is unpack the download and set up the necessary folders and files. As you unpack the download, notice the folders and files used.

Once the download is complete, simply copy the content from the /usr/local/lib/ folder into your new Kafka cluster.

Finally, copy the /usr/local/share/ directory and its contents into your new cluster as well.

How to set up a Kafka stream:

A stream is just a group of topics and/or data items that are connected by a single path or connection. You can create unlimited streams and publish data to them, which means you can route data through Kafka without going through your own servers or data centers.

To create a stream, simply create a topic and put the data you want to stream in that topic. You can name your topics whatever you want, but you should make it clear what the data set is and where it comes from.

For example, you could name your topic “weather” and your stream “cast”. Once you’ve got your topic and stream setup, you can publish your stream to the internet and start sending data to it.

How to set up a Kafka topic:

A topic is like a subdomain within a stream. Every topic is just a group of related data items. Like a stream, a topic can be public or private. But unlike a stream, you can have unlimited topics in a Kafka topic.

Another thing, a topic can also contain other topics or files. So, for example, you could have a “weather forecast” topic, which would contain data items such as the current weather in your area, the latest weather photos, and forecasts.

Also, you can create a sub-folder within each topic called “files”, which can contain images, tables, etc.

Getting ready to publish to Kafka

Once you’ve got your cluster set up, you can start publishing data to it.

From the command line, type “kafka publish-producer” to publish data to the cluster, and “kafka publish-consumer” to receive data from the cluster.

Further, you can also publish and receive data programmatically, which means you can do things like send a message to a topic, and have your server receive it and process it, without having to use the command line.

How to check if your machine is running Kafka

Kafka uses decentralized technology the same used in blockchain to store data that’s constantly being updated.

So, while your computer is sitting there doing nothing, it’s constantly updating the data stored on the blockchain.

To check if your computer is running Kafka, type “kafka get-info” in a command prompt or terminal window and look for the “version” and “project” lines.

Conclusion:

In this article, we covered what is Kafka, what can you store in Kafka, and how to set up Kafka on your Windows computer. We also looked at what is needed to set up a simple Kafka cluster, how to create a stream, and how to create a topic.

With these steps, you can start using Kafka to store and process messages from your applications or websites over TCP/IP networks.

Originally posted 2022-11-17 23:13:30.