Kafka package

The Kafka package enables you to automate the process of connecting to an Apache Kafka cluster through a reusable session, publishing messages to topics, consuming messages by polling, and managing consumer group offsets.

Overview

The Kafka package lets you automate interactions with Apache Kafka, a distributed event-streaming platform. You can use this package to connect to Kafka clusters secured with multiple authentication modes, publish messages to topics, poll and consume messages, and commit consumer group offsets as part of an end-to-end automation workflow.

The following table provides some of the key concepts used in Kafka:

Concept Description
Broker A Kafka server that stores and serves messages. A cluster is made up of one or more brokers.
Topic A named feed to which messages are written and read from.
Partition Topics are split into partitions for parallelism. Each message in a partition has a sequential offset.
Producer A client that publishes messages to a topic.
Consumer A client that reads messages from a topic. Consumers belong to a consumer group to share the load.
Offset The position of a message within a partition. Committing an offset marks all prior messages as processed.
Bootstrap Servers The initial broker addresses a client connects to in order to discover the rest of the cluster.

Actions in the Kafka package

Action Description
Commit offsets Commit offsets action in the Kafka package
Connect Connect action in the Kafka package
Consume message Consume messages action in the Kafka package
Disconnect Disconnect action in the Kafka package
Publish message Publish message action in the Kafka package