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Someone on the team asks how many partitions the new topic needs, and you're about to just copy the number from another team's topic without checking it.
What you'll have at the end
A partition count backed by real throughput math, target consumer parallelism included, written down and defensible in review
You need
A specific peak throughput number for the new topic, or a stakeholder who can give you one, and a clear description of what the consuming service actually does with each message.
Not covered
Changing an existing keyed topic's partition count after it's already carrying traffic, a separate and far more constrained operation.
Leans on
Pick a partition key that keeps one customer's events in order
when the question is which field routes a message to a partition, not how many partitions to create.
Why is my Kafka consumer group stuck rebalancing every few minutes?
when the partition count is already set and consumers keep dropping out and rejoining instead.
Checked 25 Aug 2026
Part of the Apache Kafka cookbook