Open for enrollment· Beginner

Kafka Fundamentals

Build a strong foundation in Kafka architecture, producers, consumers, partitions, offsets, consumer groups, replication, and basic troubleshooting.

Format

Live, instructor-led remote sessions

Price

$149$129

Next cohort

Oct 7, 2026 — October Cohort

Schedule

Thursdays, 12:00-2:00 PM ET

Enroll in This Cohort

Who it’s for

Engineers who need to build or maintain services that produce or consume Kafka messages
Backend, platform, and data engineers new to event streaming
Anyone who has read about Kafka but has not operated it hands-on

What you’ll leave able to do

Explain brokers, topics, partitions, replication, and consumer groups using a live Kafka example.
Deploy and configure a Kafka cluster in the supported lab environment and inspect its operational state.
Produce and consume messages using appropriate client tools and verify the flow end to end.
Monitor consumer lag and broker health using practical observability signals from the lab environment.
Diagnose common producer, consumer, and broker issues using the concepts covered in the labs.
Perform controlled failure exercises and explain how recovery behavior changes under partial outages.
Apply security and access-control concepts covered in the curriculum to a safe lab environment.
Use the Kafka CLI and broker metadata to troubleshoot typical operational problems during hands-on exercises.

Preview the learning experience

Sample lesson

Understanding Kafka Consumer Groups and Consumer Lag

12-minute sample lesson

A short preview that explains how partitions, ownership, and lag appear in a running Kafka environment.

Understand partitions and consumer groups.
Observe consumer lag in a running Kafka cluster.
Introduce consumer processing delays.
Monitor lag and troubleshoot the bottleneck.

Sample lab

Sample Lab: Consumer Lag and Resolution

Students launch a small Kafka cluster, create topics, introduce consumer delays, and compare lag trends before and after tuning.

Create topics and verify partition distribution.
Start producers and consumers in a controlled lab environment.
Introduce slow processing on a consumer group.
Measure lag and identify the bottleneck.
Review the operational fix and expected results.

Curriculum

01Kafka architecture
02Topics and partitions
03Producers
04Consumers
05Consumer groups
06Offsets
07Replication basics
08Kafka CLI
09Basic troubleshooting
10Hands-on mini project

Hands-on labs

Stand up a local Kafka cluster and create topics from the CLI
Write a producer and consumer and watch offsets move in real time
Simulate a broker failure and observe replication in action
Diagnose a stuck consumer group

Instructor snapshot

Tulika Gupta

Tulika Gupta brings hands-on infrastructure engineering and technical leadership experience from production environments, with a focus on Kafka, messaging, distributed systems, high availability, and cloud operations.

Why this matters

Approximately 10 years of infrastructure engineering and technical leadership experience at Alarm.com.
Progression through DevOps Engineer, Senior DevOps Engineer, Principal DevOps Engineer, and DevOps Manager roles.
Hands-on work across Kafka, Apache ActiveMQ Artemis, Redis Enterprise, cloud infrastructure, and production operations.
Practical focus on real system behavior, reliability, and troubleshooting under production constraints.

Format

Live, instructor-led remote sessions

Prerequisites

Comfortable working in a terminal and writing basic code in any language
No prior Kafka or messaging experience is required

Enrollment, support, and policy

Payment & checkout

One-time payment for the cohort.

Live instructor-led sessions
Hands-on lab environment access
Course materials and exercises
Cohort onboarding and practical troubleshooting guidance

Support

Community and post-course support options will be announced before the cohort begins.

Live instruction during the scheduled cohort
Hands-on lab exercises during the course
Course materials and instructor guidance during the cohort

Enrollment policy

Refund requests are considered on a case-by-case basis before the course start date and only when the enrollment terms have been explicitly approved by the founder.
Students who withdraw before the course start date may be eligible for a credit or partial refund based on the approved policy and the amount of course preparation already incurred.
If the instructor or cohort is rescheduled, students will be offered the next available cohort or a comparable alternative within the same course track when feasible.
A cohort may be cancelled or rescheduled if minimum enrollment requirements are not met, and students will be notified in advance.

Draft policy — awaiting founder approval before publication