Wrote an essay on what Kafka does when we add

Arpit Bhayani

Arpit Bhayani

Dec 14, 2025 • 1 min read


Wrote an essay on what Kafka does when we add new partitions to a topic and the design trade-offs it makes.

Last weekend, I went down the rabbit hole to understand what really happens when you add partitions, how data placement works, why ordering can break, and how consumer groups reshuffle during the process.

If you’re working with Kafka or are curious to know how it works, this breakdown should give you a clear starting point. Give it a read.

Arpit Bhayani

Principal Engineer II at Razorpay - building Agent Studio, Ex-staff engg at GCP Memorystore & Dataproc, Creator of DiceDB, ex-Amazon Fast Data, ex-Director of Engg. SRE and Data Engineering at Unacademy. I spark engineering curiosity through my no-fluff engineering videos on YouTube and my courses