Publish and read your first Kafka message

You've never actually sent a message.

BeginnerRead 4 minDoing: about 20 minutes5 steps

What you'll have at the end

A topic you created yourself, one message produced and read back with its partition and offset visible

Before you start

You need

A Kafka broker already running somewhere you can reach, and its command-line tools available to run from a terminal.

Not covered

Choosing how many partitions a real topic needs, or which key routes messages to which partition.

Leans on

Right-size a new Kafka topic's partitions

for when a real topic needs more than one partition and you have to size it

Pick a partition key that keeps one customer's events in order

once a topic has more than one partition and the order of a given key's messages matters

Checked 25 Aug 2026