Improving Scalability and Performance with Kafka Leader Election

Dive deep into the intricacies of leader election in Apache Kafka® with Adithya Chandra, Staff Software Engineer at Confluent, in this 51-minute podcast episode. Explore the fundamental concepts of Kafka replication, including the leader-based model, failover mechanisms, and preferred leader election. Learn how leader election improves scalability and performance, handles broker failures, and ensures data consistency. Discover the challenges of leader failover, including scenarios requiring manual intervention. Understand the importance of leadership priority in Confluent Cloud for optimizing broker selection and maintaining reliable replication. Gain insights into potential improvements and applications of leader election in various scenarios, from debugging to network and storage health solutions. Enhance your knowledge of Kafka's replication protocol and operational simplicity through this comprehensive discussion on leader election and its impact on Kafka's efficiency and reliability.

- Intro
- What is leadership election?
- How does it work?
- Clean vs unclean failover
- What are the failover steps?
- Optimizing leadership election for Confluent Cloud
- It's a wrap!