Configuring Kafka Topics

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Configuring Kafka Topics

Kafka topics are highly configurable, allowing you to customize their behavior in a variety of ways. In this hands-on lab, you will have the opportunity to work with Kafka configurations by making some changes to the configuration of an existing topic. You will also work with global broker configuration by changing some default topic configuration values that will be used for new topics.

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Lab Info

Level

Intermediate

Last updated

Sep 23, 2025

Duration

30m

Challenge

Enable `unclean.leader.election` for the `inventory_purchases` Topic

Set unclean.leader.election.enable to true for the topic:

kafka-configs --zookeeper localhost:2181 --entity-type topics --entity-name inventory_purchases --alter --add-config unclean.leader.election.enable=true

Challenge

Set a 3-Day Retention Period for the Cluster Default and the Existing `inventory_purchases` Topic

Set the default retention period for the cluster to 259200000 ms:

kafka-configs --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --entity-type brokers --entity-default --alter --add-config log.retention.ms=259200000

Set the retention period for the topic to 259200000 ms:

kafka-configs --zookeeper localhost:2181 --entity-type topics --entity-name inventory_purchases --alter --add-config retention.ms=259200000

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