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This blog provides an overview around the two fundamental concepts in Apache Kafka: Topics and Partitions. A topic is divided into 1 or more partitions, enabling producer and consumer loads to be scaled. The size (in terms of messages stored) of partitions is limited to what can fit on a single node. Partitions can have copies to increase durability and availability, and enables Kafka to failover to a broker with a replica of the partition if the broker with the leader partition fails. This is called the Replication Factor and can be configured cluster wide or set/checked per topic.