Apache Kafka is well known for its performance and tunability to optimize for various use cases. But sometimes it can be challenging to find the right infrastructure configuration that meets your specific performance requirements while minimizing the infrastructure cost.
This post explains how the underlying infrastructure affects Apache Kafka performance. We discuss strategies on how to size your clusters to meet your throughput, availability, and latency requirements. Along the way, we answer questions like “when does it make sense to scale up vs. scale out?” We end with guidance on how to continuously verify the size of your production clusters.
We use performance tests to illustrate and explain the effect and trade-off of different strategies to size your cluster. But as usual, it’s important to not just blindly trust benchmarks you happen to find on the internet. We therefore not only show how to reproduce the results, but also explain how to use a performance testing framework to run your own tests for your specific workload characteristics.