Learn Apache Kafka, from scratch to production.

Free Apache Kafka tutorials, hands-on labs, and production playbooks. From your first topic to running brokers under load. Patient, opinionated, and built by the team behind Conduktor. Read in any order, skip what you already know.

A developer explaining a Kafka data flow to his team at a whiteboard

Where are you starting from?

Understand it, do it, run it. Most Kafka courses pick one of these. Ours runs all three in parallel, because you don't really know Kafka until you've broken it on your laptop.

A developer on a train, sketching a data flow in a notebookNew to Kafka

Learn Build the mental model

The vocabulary, the diagrams, the why. No setup, no Docker. Read on the train.

  • What is Apache Kafka?
  • Topics, partitions and offsets
  • Producers and consumers
  • Brokers and topic replication
  • KRaft and ZooKeeper
10 chapters, no install required
Start with the fundamentals →

A developer at a laptop with a terminal and code openUsed it a bit

Practice Get your hands dirty

Install Kafka on your laptop. Drive it from the CLI, then from Java.

  • Install Kafka on Mac, Linux or Docker
  • Manage topics from the CLI
  • Drive producers and consumers via CLI
  • Build a Java producer and consumer
  • Wire up a Maven or Gradle project
24 hands-on guides across install, CLI and code
Start with the CLI →or install Kafka first

A developer watching monitoring dashboards in the eveningRun it in production

Master Run it like you mean it

The settings that make or break an on-call shift. Tune, secure, monitor, scale.

  • Topic internals and log compaction
  • Producer acks, idempotence, batching
  • Consumer delivery semantics
  • Security, monitoring, multi-cluster
  • Min ISR and unclean leader election
31 deep dives on topics, producers, consumers, ops
Go advanced →

Keep going

New track · 36 lessons Kafka Streams, end to end Go past producers and consumers. Build stateful stream processing, then run it in production, with the rebalancing, state restore and exactly-once failures the official tutorials skip. KStream vs KTableState storesStreams vs Flink vs ksqlDB Start the Kafka Streams track → Reference tool Kafka Options Explorer Compare Kafka configs across every version. Read KIPs, decode error codes, plan upgrades. Configs by versionEvery KIPUpgrade reports Open the explorer ↗

Done with Kafkademy?

Put what you learned into a real Kafka stack.

Conduktor Console gives you topic management, message browsing, schema control and access policies, on top of any Kafka cluster. Free tier, no card needed.

Try Conduktor Console →

Stuck on a lesson? Ask the Conduktor community on Slack ↗