Record order and assignment

Learn about how Kafka assigns records to partitions.

By default, Kafka assigns records to a partitions round-robin. There is no guarantee that records sent to multiple partitions will retain the order in which they were produced. Within a single consumer, your program will only have record ordering within the records belonging to the same partition. This tends to be sufficient for many use cases, but does add some complexity to the stream processing logic.

If the order of records is important, the producer can ensure that records are sent to the same partition. The producer can include metadata in the record to override the default assignment in one of two ways:

• The record can indicate a specific partition.
• The record can includes an assignment key.

  The hash of the key and the number of partitions in the topic determines which partition the record is assigned to. Including the same key in multiple records ensures all the records are appended to the same partition.