Introduction to Kafka in Podman

Learning path | 4 resources | 30 mins | Published on November 11, 2025
Don Schenck

Kafka is a powerful event streaming platform. In this learning path, you will learn about Kafka and how it can be run in a container in Podman. This understanding is a good prerequisite to running Kafka in Red Hat OpenShift.

Access the Developer Sandbox

  1. Overview: Introduction to Kafka in Podman
  2. Run Apache Kafka in Podman Page | 15 mins
  3. Run a Kafka producer application Page | 10 mins
  4. Run a Kafka consumer application Page | 5 mins

Overview: Introduction to Kafka in Podman

Feature image for Red Hat OpenShift

Apache Kafka is a mature open source solution for event streaming. When combined with container technology, Kafka is easy to use, robust, and scalable. In this learning path, you will learn a few basics of Kafka and use two applications to send and receive messages.

Note that this is only an introductory and learning experience. In a production OpenShift environment, you would use Red Hat Streams for Apache Kafka. However, the information learned in this learning path is transferable to a production environment. It is also useful when developing solutions on your local PC.

To get full benefit from taking this lesson, you need:

  • A basic understanding of containers.
  • Podman installed on your PC.
  • Node.js installed on your PC.
  • Git installed on your PC.

In this learning path, you will:

  • Start Kafka in Podman.
  • Run a program to produce messages.
  • Run a program to consume and display messages.