1. Congratulations!
Well done completing this introductory look into Kafka! Let's take a moment to review what we've covered.
2. Review
We've covered quite a bit in the past two chapters. We've learned the primary components of a Kafka installation, including Kafka producers, and consumers. We've also learned about how messages sent are managed with Kafka topics.
In addition, we've covered the basics of Kafka's architecture including using Apache ZooKeeper and how Kafka servers / brokers are used.
Finally, we covered a few troubleshooting methods for working with Kafka.
3. Next steps
Let's talk about a few next steps for learning more about Kafka. The first suggestion is to read the various documentation available at kafka.apache.org. This covers a significant amount of content ranging from a few quickstarts to deep architectural guidance. I'd suggest picking an appropriate topic, pun intended, and read more about it.
Another option is to run the help option on various Kafka console commands to get more detail about what can be done. There are several options that can help you tune your usage for a specific application and are a great method to learn more about how Kafka works with other tools.
Finally, we've only covered the base console components, but there are many programming language specific libraries for Kafka. This includes Python, Rust, and so on. These libraries allow you to create producers and consumers in a specific language, and often allow topic management as well. These can allow you to keep most all of your application within a given language instead of having to constantly use console commands to share data with Kafka.
4. Great work!
There's obviously a lot more to learn about Kafka, but you're off to a great start. Congratulations once again on completing this course - I hope you've found the content valuable and wish you luck on your future learning!