Apache Kafka Overview Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform for high-throughput, fault-tolerant messaging. It's the backbone of event-driven architectures — used for real-time data pipelines, event sourcing, log aggregation, and microservice communication. Instructions Step 1: Local Setup Step 2: Node.js Producer Step 3: Consumer Step 4: Python Consumer Guidelines - Use partition keys to ensure related events go to the same partition (ordering guarantee). - Consumer groups enable parallel processing — each partition is consumed by one consumer in the group. - Make consumers idempote…