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Apache Kafka & Stream Processing Fundamentals · Lesson

Rack Awareness & Multi-AZ Placement

Learn how Kafka rack awareness spreads replicas across racks and availability zones to survive datacenter-level failures.

What Is Rack Awareness?

Rack awareness tells Kafka about the physical (or cloud) topology of your brokers.

Without it, all replicas of a partition could land on brokers sharing the same rack or availability zone. If that zone fails, the partition becomes unavailable.

  • Each broker advertises a broker.rack value.
  • Kafka then places replicas on different racks when possible.

Configuring broker.rack

Set broker.rack in each broker's server.properties to identify its rack or zone.

# server.properties on a broker in us-east-1a
broker.id=1
broker.rack=us-east-1a

# Another broker in a different zone
broker.id=2
broker.rack=us-east-1b

All lessons in this course

  1. Replication & Fault Tolerance
  2. Controller & ZooKeeper/Kraft Roles
  3. Designing a Kafka Cluster
  4. Rack Awareness & Multi-AZ Placement
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