Compression
In some cases the bottleneck is actually not CPU or disk but network bandwidth. This is particularly true for a data pipeline that needs to send messages between data centers over a wide-area network. Of course, the user can always compress its messages one at a time without any support needed from Kafka, but this can lead to very poor compression ratios as much of the redundancy is due to repetition between messages of the same type (e.g. field names in JSON or user agents in web logs or common string values). Efficient compression requires compressing multiple messages together rather than compressing each message individually.
Kafka supports this with an efficient batching format. A batch of messages can be clumped together compressed and sent to the server in this form. This batch of messages will be written in compressed form and will remain compressed in the log and will only be decompressed by the consumer.
Kafka supports GZIP, Snappy, LZ4 and ZStandard compression protocols. More details on compression can be found here.
Reference
- Kafka The definition Guide
- https://kafka.apache.org/documentation/