🔧 Kafka for Data Engineers: Core Concepts, KRaft, and the Patterns That Actually Work

If your Kafka Docker Compose still has a ZooKeeper service in it, your setup is already legacy. As of Kafka 4.0 (released March 2025), ZooKeeper is gone. The architecture changed, the config changed, and the setup you learned two years ago will not work with any Kafka 4.x image.

This guide covers Kafka from the ground up — what it is, how it...