System Design
Achieving Exactly-Once Delivery in Kafka: Theory vs Practice
How Kafka's idempotent producers, transactional APIs, and consumer coordination achieve exactly-once semantics — and when at-least-once is the smarter choice.
Akhil Sharma
January 14, 2026
11 min read
KafkaDistributed SystemsMessaging
More in System Design
Building a Distributed Job Scheduler
Why single-node job schedulers silently fail in production, and how to build a distributed scheduler with leader election, task deduplication, and failure recovery.
Consistent Hashing in Practice
Why modulo hashing silently nukes your cache every time you scale, and how consistent hashing solves the rebalancing problem that takes down databases.