copied from: https://claude.ai/share/e4bed98a-9049-44b3-9aee-173bba941120
When a Kafka producer sets partitions explicitly, there are several important trade-offs to consider:
- Guaranteed Message Ordering: Messages sent to the same partition are guaranteed to maintain their order. This is crucial for use cases where sequence matters, like financial transactions or event sourcing.
- Predictable Data Locality: You can ensure related messages always go to the same partition, which helps with consumer processing efficiency and stateful operations.
- Load Distribution Control: You have fine-grained control over how messages are distributed across partitions, allowing you to optimize for your specific access patterns.
- Deterministic Behavior: Your application's behavior becomes more predictable since you know exactly where each message will land.