Managing Kafka topics

The distributed Kafka system uses a model of topics and partitions to organize data.

A topic is a category used to group a message stream. Multiple producers and consumers with access to it can work with a topic independently.

Partitions

Each topic can have multiple partitions—physical units for data storage. Partitions are used for parallel data processing and system scaling. Each message is written to a specific topic partition. All messages within a single partition maintain their order.

When creating a topic, you can specify the number of topic partitions. After the topic is created, you can only increase the number of partitions.

Create a topic

1. In the Control panel, in the top menu, click Products and select Cloud Databases.
2. Open the Active tab.
3. Open the cluster page → Topics tab.
4. Click Create topic.
5. Enter a topic name.
6. Enter the number of partitions. The maximum number of partitions is 4 000. You cannot decrease the number of partitions after a topic is created.
7. Click Create.

Delete a topic

1. In the Control panel, in the top menu, click Products and select Cloud Databases.
2. Open the Active tab.
3. Open the cluster page → Topics tab.
4. In the menu of the topic, select Delete.
5. Enter the topic name to confirm the deletion.
6. Click Delete.