When you create a topic there are two different concepts - partitions and replication. If you have 3 brokers and create a topic with 1 partition, then the entire topic exists only on one of those brokers. If you create a topic with 3 paritions then 1/3 of the topic is on broker 1 as partition 1, 1/3 on broker 2 as partition 2, and 1/3 on broker 3 as partition 3. If you create a topic with 3 partitions AND replicaiton factor of 2, then its same as above except there is also a copy of each partition on another node. So parition 1 may be on broker 1 with a copy on broker 2, parition 2 maybe be on broker 2 with a copy on broker 3, and partition 3 may be on broker 3 with a copy on broker 1. In general, replication ensures that if a broker goes down then another broker still has the data, and partition allows for higher read/write throughput by dividing up the data across multiple nodes. ... View more