As described in Apache Kafka Concepts, Kafka maintains feeds of messages in categories called topics. Producers write data to topics and consumers read from topics. Since Kafka is a distributed system, topics are partitioned and replicated across multiple nodes. Kafka treats each topic partition as a log (an ordered set of messages). Each message in a partition is assigned a unique offset.

Each topic has a user-defined category (or feed name), to which messages are published.

To create a Kafka topic, run kafka-topics.sh and specify topic name, replication factor, and other attributes:

/bin/kafka-topics.sh --create \
    --zookeeper <hostname>:<port> \
    --topic <topic-name> \
    --partitions <number-of-partitions> \
    --replication-factor <number-of-replicating-servers>

The following example creates a topic named "test", with one partition and one replica:

bin/kafka-topics.sh --create \
    --zookeeper localhost:2181 \
    --replication-factor 1 \
    --partitions 1 \
    --topic test

To view the topic, run the list topic command:

> bin/kafka-topics.sh --list --zookeeper localhost:2181
test

To create topics on a cluster with Kerberos enabled, see Creating Kafka Topics in the HDP Security Guide.

The auto.create.topics.enable property, when set to true, automatically creates topics when applications attempt to produce, consume, or fetch metadata for a nonexistent topic. For more information, see Kafka Broker Settings.