This post follows on from my earlier Kafka Basics and Demo blog. This time we take a look at the packets. How does a Kafka producer send a message to a topic? How on earth does a Kafka consumer know that there is a message waiting to be fetched?
In this video, we look at the Kafka protocol basics with Wireshark. We learn how producers and consumers communicate with nodes and, importantly, how we find the packets that match errors in the Kafka log.
Author: Paul is Head of Site Reliability Engineering at a financial services company. He started in the IT industry in 1977 as a hardware engineer, moved to software engineering and then to network management before founding Advance7, a performance and stability consultancy. Paul is an amateur coder and has authored some Wireshark plugins. This is a personal blog and in no way represents the stance, opinion or strategy of his employer.