Top 5 Kafka Patterns Every System Designer Must Know

Apache Kafka is more than just a messaging platform. It’s a powerful tool for building scalable, reliable, and real-time systems. But to use Kafka effectively, you need to understand its key design patterns.

In this article, we’ll go over 5 essential Kafka patterns that every system designer should know. You’ll learn what they are, why they matter, and how to use them in real-world applications

Publish-Subscribe Pattern

What It Is:

In the Publish-Subscribe (or Pub-Sub) pattern, a producer sends messages to a topic, and multiple consumers can subscribe to that topic. Each consumer gets a copy of every message.

Why It’s Useful:

• Multiple services can listen to the same data stream
• Decouples the producer and consumer logic
• Ideal for broadcasting events, logs, and notifications

Example: User Activity Logs

A web app sends user activity logs to a Kafka topic:

Producer: Sends activity data to the user-logs topic.
Consumers:

• AnalyticsService processes data for user metrics.
• NotificationService…