Demo Creating First Topic in Kafka

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create an Apache Kafka topic using the Kafka UI. A topic in Kafka is a named stream where related events are stored—a logical channel for appending and reading records. By the end of this lesson, you’ll have a topic named kafka-lab ready for producers and consumers.

Prerequisites

A running Kafka cluster (e.g., via Docker).
Kafka UI configured and accessible.
Apache Kafka Documentation for deeper reference.

1. Creating a Topic via the Kafka UI

In the Kafka UI sidebar, select Topics.
Click Add a topic.
Enter Topic name: kafka-lab
Warning
Topic names cannot contain spaces or special characters. Use hyphens (-) or underscores (_) to separate words.
Configure the following options:
- Number of partitions: 1
- Message retention: 7 days
Leave the remaining settings at their defaults and click Create topic.

The image shows a user interface for creating a new topic in Apache Kafka, with fields for topic name, number of partitions, cleanup policy, and other configuration options.

Why These Settings Matter

Configuration	Purpose	Example Impact
Number of partitions	Parallelism & distribution across brokers	More partitions = higher throughput
Message retention	Duration Kafka retains messages before deletion	7 days = temporary event storage

2. Verifying Your Topic

After creation, you can confirm the topic details in the UI:

The image shows a user interface for Apache Kafka, displaying details of a topic named "kafka-lab" with information on partitions, replication factor, and message count.

This overview displays:

Partitions: How many shards the topic is split into.
Replication factor: Number of copies for fault tolerance.
Message count: Total events stored so far.

3. (Optional) Creating a Topic via CLI

For automation or scripting, use the kafka-topics.sh tool:

bin/kafka-topics.sh \
  --create \
  --topic kafka-lab \
  --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 \
  --partitions 1 \
  --replication-factor 1 \
  --config retention.ms=$((7*24*60*60*1000))

This command mirrors the UI settings: one partition, one replica, and a seven-day retention period.

Next Steps

Produce and consume messages with kafka-console-producer.sh and kafka-console-consumer.sh.
Monitor topic metrics in the Kafka UI or Prometheus.
Explore advanced topic configurations in the Kafka topic configuration reference.

That’s it for setting up your first Kafka topic! Proceed to the next lesson to start streaming data.

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