Kafka for Data Engineers: Core Concepts, KRaft, and the Patterns That Actually Work

Kafka 4.0 has removed ZooKeeper, making KRaft the new standard for cluster setup and operation.

The guide explains Kafka fundamentals for 2026: brokers, topics, partitions, offsets, consumer groups, and rebalancing.

It also covers the newer rebalance behavior introduced by KIP-848 and what that means for production consumers.

For data engineers, the article highlights reliable ingestion and CDC patterns using Kafka Connect, Debezium, and PostgreSQL.