Master Apache Kafka configuration, monitoring, and optimization for production environments. This hands-on course teaches you to design high-availability topic architectures, diagnose performance bottlenecks using consumer lag analysis, and tune producers and consumers for maximum throughput while meeting strict latency SLAs. Through real-world scenarios based on challenges faced by companies like Netflix, LinkedIn, Uber, and Walmart, you'll learn to prevent data loss during broker failures, eliminate consumer lag issues, and optimize Kafka clusters processing millions of events per second. By the end of this course, you'll have the skills to build, monitor, and optimize production Kafka infrastructure that handles massive scale while maintaining reliability and performance.

Gain next-level skills with Coursera Plus for $199 (regularly $399). Save now.

Optimize Kafka for Speed & Availability
This course is part of Real-Time, Real Fast: Kafka & Spark for Data Engineers Specialization


Instructors: Starweaver
Included with
Recommended experience
What you'll learn
Configure Kafka topics with appropriate replication factors, partition counts, and durability settings to ensure high availability.
Diagnose performance bottlenecks using consumer lag metrics, broker health indicators, and throughput analysis.
Optimize producer and consumer configurations including batching, compression, and parallelism to maximize throughput while meeting latency SLAs.
Skills you'll gain
Details to know

Add to your LinkedIn profile
January 2026
1 assignment
See how employees at top companies are mastering in-demand skills

Build your subject-matter expertise
- Learn new concepts from industry experts
- Gain a foundational understanding of a subject or tool
- Develop job-relevant skills with hands-on projects
- Earn a shareable career certificate

There are 3 modules in this course
Learn to configure Kafka topics with appropriate replication factors, partition counts, and durability settings to ensure data availability during failures while optimizing for throughput and parallelism.
What's included
4 videos2 readings1 peer review
Master consumer lag monitoring, broker health metrics, and throughput analysis to identify and diagnose performance bottlenecks before they impact production systems.
What's included
3 videos1 reading1 peer review
Learn to tune producer batching, compression, and consumer fetch settings to maximize throughput while meeting latency SLAs. Balance competing performance requirements for production workloads.
What's included
4 videos1 reading1 assignment2 peer reviews
Earn a career certificate
Add this credential to your LinkedIn profile, resume, or CV. Share it on social media and in your performance review.
Offered by
Why people choose Coursera for their career




Frequently asked questions
To access the course materials, assignments and to earn a Certificate, you will need to purchase the Certificate experience when you enroll in a course. You can try a Free Trial instead, or apply for Financial Aid. The course may offer 'Full Course, No Certificate' instead. This option lets you see all course materials, submit required assessments, and get a final grade. This also means that you will not be able to purchase a Certificate experience.
When you enroll in the course, you get access to all of the courses in the Specialization, and you earn a certificate when you complete the work. Your electronic Certificate will be added to your Accomplishments page - from there, you can print your Certificate or add it to your LinkedIn profile.
Yes. In select learning programs, you can apply for financial aid or a scholarship if you can’t afford the enrollment fee. If fin aid or scholarship is available for your learning program selection, you’ll find a link to apply on the description page.
More questions
Financial aid available,




