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José David Baena
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Kafka Engineering
📡

Kafka Engineering

A source-guided course on Kafka protocol internals, platform ownership, KRaft and KIP-848 migrations, compatibility, portability, performance, and production failure boundaries.

complete13 / 13 episodes•171 min total•advanced
Series Progress100%

What You'll Learn

  • ✓Read and debug Kafka request framing and version negotiation
  • ✓Trace producer, fetch, replication, compression, and quota behavior
  • ✓Plan KRaft, KIP-848, and portability migrations without false equivalence
  • ✓Define ownership boundaries between platform and application teams
  • ✓Diagnose production failures from protocol and operational evidence

Episodes by Track

📡

Protocol Internals

Implementation, wire compatibility, request flow, durability, compression, and quotas

8 posts
1

Debugging a Kafka Protocol Implementation: When 11 Messages Become 1

12/12/2025•15 min read
→
2

Kafka Wire Protocol: How Compatibility Survives Upgrades

12/19/2025•14 min read
→
3

Kafka Fetch Sessions: Scaling Beyond Linear Requests

12/26/2025•13 min read
→
4

Where a Kafka Request Spends Its Milliseconds

1/2/2026•14 min read
→
5

Kafka Producer Idempotence, Fencing, and Transactions

1/9/2026•15 min read
→
6

Kafka Replication: How the Next Leader Proves Durability

1/16/2026•16 min read
→
7

Kafka Compression: Choosing a Codec With Real Workloads

1/23/2026•13 min read
→
8

Kafka Quotas: How Brokers Contain Noisy Neighbors

1/30/2026•14 min read
→
🛠️

Production & Platform

Consumer-group ownership, platform contracts, observability, and operational boundaries

1 post
9

Kafka Consumer Groups Are Platform Infrastructure

2/6/2026•9 min read
→
🚀

Evolution & Migrations

KRaft, KIP-848, compatibility, portability, and vendor transitions

4 posts
10

Kafka 4.x Without ZooKeeper: Planning the KRaft Cutover

2/13/2026•11 min read
→
11

Kafka 4.x Client Compatibility and KIP-848 Migration

2/20/2026•11 min read
→
12

IBM's Confluent Acquisition: What Portability Really Means

2/27/2026•10 min read
→
13

Kafka Compatibility Is Not the Same as Portability

3/6/2026•16 min read
→

Prerequisites

  • •Kafka fundamentals
  • •Distributed systems fundamentals
  • •Networking fundamentals

Who This Is For

  • •backend-engineers
  • •platform-engineers
  • •kafka-operators
  • •architects

Topics Covered

kafkadistributed-systemsprotocolsstreamingplatform-engineeringmigrationsperformance

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