distributed systems

This guide is for setting up a local Kafka environment in a single machine quickly. A properly configured Kafka cluster is laborious to set up and has a lot of dependencies like Apache ZooKeeper etc. and that can be disconcerting if you just want to develop locally or put together a proof of concept prototype. This is obviously not the way to set up a production Kafka cluster as there is no security, redundancy, fault tolerance, scaling and a host of other requirements for a production grade environment.