Inside Kafka — Partitions, Replication & Leaders Explained | Interview Deep Dive

How Kafka really works under the hood: partitions, replication, leaders and followers, ISR, and how Kafka stays available when a broker dies. This is the deep dive that separates strong system design candidates from the rest. Lesson 10 of a 23-part message broker crash course for FAANG interviews. You'll learn: • Partitions and how they enable parallelism • Replication factor, leaders & followers • In-sync replicas (ISR) and fault tolerance • How partition keys control ordering ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Opening the hood 0:22 Partitions explained 0:44 Parallelism & ordering 1:28 The partition key 2:36 Replication: surviving failure 2:54 In-sync replicas (ISR) 3:15 The durable config trio 3:58 How many partitions? 4:36 ZooKeeper vs KRaft ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📚 FULL SERIES — Message Brokers & Event-Driven Architecture (23 episodes):    • Kafka & Message Queues Explained | System ...   🔔 Subscribe for system design interview prep:    / @nodeprism   This is the crash course I wish I had before my FAANG system design interviews — Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS/SNS, queues, streaming, and the patterns that actually come up. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ #kafka #systemdesign #distributedsystems