Producers create records (messages) and send them to the Apache® Kafka® cluster. Producers are the specific implementation of the messaging system. The producers are responsible for accepting a record from the application, converting it to the appropriate network protocol format, and dealing with the networking, failover, and other features such as batching and transactioning of the messaging system.

Message producers are often distributed across a LAN or WAN environment, separated geographically, and written in different programming languages. The producers could be running on various operating systems as well. Messages arrive from many different clients, and are stored in the order in which they are received by the broker. The producers do not know or care what happens to the message after it is successfully stored by a broker.