What We're Building:
Design StreamSocial's topic architecture with optimal partition strategy
Implement user-actions topic (1000 partitions) and content-interactions topic (500 partitions)
Calculate partition count for 50M requests/second throughput
Build partition key strategies for ordering guarantees
Create real-time monitoring dashboard for partition health
Develop comprehensive testing suite with performance validation
Success Targets:
Topics created with calculated partition counts
Even message distribution across partitions confirmed
Ordering maintained within partitions for user actions
Web dashboard displaying live partition metrics
System ready to handle 50M req/s theoretical capacity
Core Concepts: Partitioning - The Art of Divide and Conquer
Think of Kafka partitions like lanes on a highway. More lanes = more cars can travel simultaneously. But unlike highways, Kafka's lanes have a special property: messages in the same lane always arrive in order.