How to Install Apache Kafka on Ubuntu Linux (2025)

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How to Install Apache Kafka on Ubuntu Linux | Complete Step-by-Step Guide In this detailed tutorial, you’ll learn **how to install Apache Kafka on Ubuntu Linux** step-by-step. Kafka is a high-performance **distributed streaming platform** used for real-time data pipelines, event-driven systems, and microservices communication. Whether you're a developer, data engineer, DevOps professional, or a beginner exploring Kafka, this guide will help you install, configure, and run Kafka smoothly on your Ubuntu machine. We’ll cover downloading Kafka, configuring Zookeeper (or KRaft mode for newer versions), starting the services, creating topics, sending messages, and testing your setup with Kafka CLI tools. ### **In This Video, You Will Learn:** ✅ What Apache Kafka is and why it’s used ✅ How to install required dependencies (Java, wget, tar) ✅ How to download Kafka from the official Apache website ✅ How to extract Kafka and place it in `/opt` ✅ How to start Zookeeper (for older Kafka versions) ✅ How to start Kafka server ✅ How to use KRaft mode (without Zookeeper) for Kafka 3.7+ ✅ How to create Kafka topics ✅ How to send and consume messages using CLI tools ✅ How to run Kafka as a background service ✅ How to fix common startup errors ### **Why Use Kafka?** Kafka is widely used for: * Real-time streaming data * Microservices communication * Event-driven architectures * Collecting logs & metrics * Big data processing pipelines * High-throughput messaging Companies like Uber, Net