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Interactive Kafka Streams Architecture Simulation

This interactive simulation helps you understand the Kafka Streams architecture. See how messages flow through the application, and how partitions and threads impact the message processing.

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About This Simulation

This interactive visualization demonstrates the internal architecture of Kafka Streams and how messages flow through the processing pipeline. Watch in real-time as messages are polled from topic partitions, buffered in record queues, processed through the topology, and written to output topics.

What You Can Explore:

  • Multi-threading: See how stream threads operate independently and how tasks are created for every partition
  • Backpressure: Observe how record queues fill up and trigger consumer pause/resume behavior when capacity limits are reached
  • Message Processing: Follow messages through the complete lifecycle: polling → deserialization → processing → serialization → output
  • Topology Execution: Watch how records flow through source → processor → sink nodes within each task
  • Configuration Impact: Experiment with different partition counts, thread counts, and throughput settings to see how they affect processing behavior

Hover over any component to see detailed explanations of its role in the Kafka Streams architecture.

Yennick Trevels author
Hi! I'm Yennick Trevels. I hope you loved this tool. But there's more! I'm writing a Kafka Streams Field Guide, with 8 essential insights for running Kafka Streams in production.
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