Kafka Topic Naming Conventions

Kafka topic can have any names you want. It is very important to choose a naming convention in your company to maintain some kind of consistency.

If you need ideas, I recommend reading this blog: https://cnr.sh/essays/how-paint-bike-shed-kafka-topic-naming-conventions

Common structures adopted are hierarchical such as <department name>.<team name>.<dataset name>.<data format> (you can define your own).

Suffixing by <data format> can be a good way to indicate in advance how to consume a topic for example .avro , .json, .text, .protobuf, .csv, .log

Valid characters for Kafka topics are the ASCII alphanumerics, ., _, and - and it is better not to mix . and _ to avoid metric namespace collisions: