Hi Anana, Typically in Kafka, it is useful for Consumers to know about the number of partitions (as the number of consumers must be <= partitions). So one way for Consumers to find partitions is the KafkaConsumer class using the partitionsFor(topic) method, https://kafka.apache.org/40/javadoc/org/apache/kafka/clients/consumer/KafkaConsumer.html#partitionsFor(java.lang.String)
Regards, Paul Brebner From: Subra I <iamsubra...@gmail.com> Date: Wednesday, 11 June 2025 at 12:42 am To: users@kafka.apache.org <users@kafka.apache.org>, d...@kafka.apache.org <d...@kafka.apache.org> Subject: KafkaProducer partitionsFor v/s KafkaAdminClient describeTopics EXTERNAL EMAIL - USE CAUTION when clicking links or attachments Hi All, I need to know the number of partitions for a topic before producing/consuming. Some users may set the number of partitions for a given topic but some users may just set the number of partitions in server.properties. It should work for both cases. Which method is better for a production grade software: 1. KafkaProducer partitionsFor 2. KafkaAdminClient describeTopics: you need to extract the topic you are interested in and get the partition info from the metadata. A quick Google search tells me that describeTopics approach is more comprehensive. Also, will the use of KafkaProducer partitionsFor work for clustered environments? Thanks, Anand
