Apache Kafka Essentials training course

This two-day course takes you from core Kafka concepts through to schema management, security, performance tuning, multi-cluster architectures, and stream processing — with labs throughout to put theory into practice.

JBI training course London UK

"Good introduction to Apache Spark. The trainer was great at talking us through the information, specifically optimisation methods. He spoke slowly and concisely which really got his points across. He effectively tailored the course to our specifications which we also appreciated."

RL, Financial Crime Technologist, Apache Spark, April 2021

Public Courses

17/08/26 - 2 days
£1995 +VAT
28/09/26 - 2 days
£1995 +VAT
09/11/26 - 2 days
£1995 +VAT

Customised Courses

* Train a team
* Tailor content
* Flex dates
From £1200 / day
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JBI training course London UK

  • Covers the full Kafka stack: producers, consumers, storage, security, Connect, and Streams
  • Hands-on labs every module, including Avro producers/consumers and JDBC connectors
  • Up to date with Kafka 4.0, including KRaft and the new consumer protocol
  • Practical comparisons: Kafka vs. database, RabbitMQ, and Pulsar
  • Covers reliability patterns including exactly-once processing and multi-cluster architectures

Day 1 — Kafka Fundamentals and Client APIs

  • Kafka overview: ecosystem, use cases, messaging concepts, topics, partitions, replication, and KRaft
  • Producers: architecture, partition selection, keys and ordering, acknowledgements, retries, batching and compression

 

  • Consumers: consumer groups, offsets, rebalancing, group coordinator, the new Kafka 4.0 consumer protocol
  • Storage: retention, segment files, compaction, state vs. event topics, and GDPR considerations
  • Lab: Create topics, produce and consume records, observe partition assignment, manage offsets

Day 1 — Kafka Architecture, Schema Registry and Security

  • Kafka in context: when Kafka fits, anti-patterns, and comparisons with databases, RabbitMQ, Pulsar, and Kafka Queues
  • Schema Registry: why schemas matter, Avro fundamentals, compatibility modes, and schema evolution

 

  •  
  • Cluster architecture: ZooKeeper, controller election, KRaft architecture, and the KRaft migration process
  • Security: TLS/SSL, SASL mechanisms, ACL authorization, and end-to-end encryption
  • Lab: Avro producer/consumer and a schema evolution exercise

Day 2 — Reliability, Performance and Kafka Connect

  • Reliability: replication internals, ISR, acknowledgement strategies, idempotent producers, transactions, and exactly-once processing
  • Performance tuning: optimizing for throughput, latency, durability, and availability
  • Kafka Connect: architecture, workers and tasks, converters, SMTs, JDBC connectors, and Debezium CDC
  • REST Proxy: architecture, use cases, and trade-offs
  • Lab: Build a JDBC source connector and a JDBC sink connector

 

 

 

 

 

Day 2 — Multi-Cluster Architectures, Monitoring and Stream Processing

  • Multi-cluster Kafka: active-passive, active-active, stretched cluster, and RPO/RTO concepts
  • Monitoring: broker, producer, and consumer metrics, JMX, Prometheus, Cruise Control, Kafka Monitor, and Trogdor
  • Stream processing concepts: event-driven analytics, stateless and stateful transformations, event time, and windowing
  • Kafka Streams: architecture, KStream, KTable, state stores, joins, aggregations, and scaling
JBI training course London UK

This course is designed for developers, engineers, and architects who need to build, operate, or secure Kafka-based systems in production. Basic programming knowledge and familiarity with distributed systems concepts are recommended; no prior Kafka experience is required.


5 star

4.8 out of 5 average

"Good introduction to Apache Spark. The trainer was great at talking us through the information, specifically optimisation methods. He spoke slowly and concisely which really got his points across. He effectively tailored the course to our specifications which we also appreciated."

RL, Financial Crime Technologist, Apache Spark, April 2021



“JBI  did a great job of customizing their syllabus to suit our business  needs and also bringing our team up to speed on the current best practices. Our teams varied widely in terms of experience and  the Instructor handled this particularly well - very impressive”

Brian F, Team Lead, RBS, Data Analysis Course, 20 April 2022

 

 

JBI training course London UK

Certification


Every delegate will be entitled to a certificate of achievement on completion of the course.

If you are missing your certificate - please use the link below to apply - you can also use this link to sign up for the JBI Training newsletter to receive technology tips directly from our instructors - Analytics, AI, ML, DevOps, Web, Backend and Security.
 



Apache Kafka has become the backbone of modern event-driven and streaming architectures, powering real-time data pipelines across banking, telecoms, and enterprise systems worldwide. This course takes participants from foundational concepts — topics, partitions, producers, and consumers — through to advanced topics including schema management, security, reliability guarantees, multi-cluster design, and stream processing with Kafka Streams.

Covering Kafka 4.0 developments such as KRaft and the new consumer protocol, the course is fully hands-on, with labs reinforcing every major module. By the end, participants will be equipped to design, build, and operate robust Kafka systems in real production environments.

JBI Training offers four Apache courses covering the most widely used Apache data processing and streaming technologies. Available courses are Apache Spark Development (two days), Apache Spark 3 — Databricks Certified Associate Developer (five days), Apache Kafka Essentials (two days), and Apache Storm (two days). All courses are available as scheduled classroom sessions in London, as live online instructor-led training, or as customised onsite programmes for data engineering and platform teams.
Apache Spark is an open-source, distributed data processing engine designed for large-scale data analytics and transformation workloads. It processes data in memory across a cluster of machines, making it significantly faster than older batch processing frameworks such as Hadoop MapReduce for most workloads. Spark is used for large-scale ETL and data transformation pipelines, machine learning at scale using the MLlib library, graph processing, stream processing using Spark Structured Streaming, and interactive data analysis. It is the most widely adopted distributed data processing framework in the industry and is available on all major cloud platforms including Azure Databricks, AWS EMR, and Google Dataproc.
The Apache Spark Development course is a two-day practical introduction to Spark for data engineers and developers who need to build and run Spark workloads. It covers the Spark architecture, the DataFrame API, Spark SQL, data transformation and aggregation, reading and writing data in various formats, and an introduction to Structured Streaming. The Apache Spark 3 — Databricks Certified Associate Developer course is a comprehensive five-day programme that covers Spark 3 in full depth and prepares delegates for the Databricks Certified Associate Developer for Apache Spark certification examination. It includes advanced Spark topics, Databricks-specific features, performance tuning, and certification-focused preparation. The five-day course is suited to data engineers who want a thorough grounding in Spark 3 and a recognised professional credential.
Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform designed to handle high-throughput, fault-tolerant, real-time data streams. It acts as a highly scalable message broker that allows applications to publish, subscribe to, store, and process streams of events in real time. Kafka is widely used for building real-time data pipelines, event-driven microservices architectures, activity tracking, operational monitoring, and stream processing applications. JBI's two-day Apache Kafka Essentials course covers the Kafka architecture and core concepts — including topics, partitions, producers, consumers, and consumer groups — setting up and configuring Kafka, producing and consuming messages, Kafka Connect for integrating with external systems, Kafka Streams for stream processing, and operational and monitoring considerations for running Kafka in production.
Apache Storm is an open-source distributed real-time computation system designed for processing unbounded streams of data with very low latency. It processes individual events as they arrive, making it well-suited to use cases that require immediate, sub-second processing of each event — such as fraud detection, real-time alerting, and financial transaction processing. Spark Structured Streaming processes data in micro-batches, introducing a small amount of latency in exchange for higher throughput and easier integration with the rest of the Spark ecosystem. The choice between Storm and Spark Streaming depends on latency requirements, existing tooling, and the nature of the streaming workload. JBI's two-day Apache Storm course covers Storm's topology model, spouts and bolts, fault tolerance, state management, and practical stream processing use cases.
The Databricks Certified Associate Developer for Apache Spark is a professional certification that validates a developer's ability to use the Spark DataFrame API, Spark SQL, and Spark's core processing capabilities at an associate level. It is widely recognised in the data engineering community and is particularly relevant for professionals working in Azure Databricks, AWS, or Google Cloud environments. JBI's five-day Apache Spark 3 — Databricks Certified Associate Developer course is specifically designed to prepare delegates for this examination, covering the full scope of the certification syllabus with hands-on exercises, practice questions, and exam technique guidance alongside comprehensive technical content.
Yes. All Apache courses at JBI can be delivered as customised onsite or online programmes for corporate data engineering and platform teams. Content and exercises can be tailored to the team's existing data stack, cloud environment, and specific use cases — for example, a team using Azure Databricks can receive Spark training focused on the Databricks environment, or a team building an event-driven microservices architecture can receive Kafka training focused on their specific integration patterns. JBI has delivered data engineering and Apache ecosystem training for teams at organisations including the BBC, NHS, RBS, Sky, EDF, and Cisco.
Yes. The Apache ecosystem evolves continuously — with regular Spark releases introducing new features to the DataFrame API, Structured Streaming, and MLlib, and ongoing Kafka developments including updates to Kafka Streams, the KRaft consensus protocol replacing ZooKeeper, and new connector capabilities. JBI's Apache training content is continuously reviewed and updated to reflect the latest stable versions of Spark and Kafka, current Databricks platform features, and evolving best practices in data engineering and real-time streaming. Delegates learn skills that are current and directly applicable to the versions and tools used in professional data engineering environments today.

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