Why Learn the CLI First? Before writing any Spring code, understanding the Kafka CLI tools gives you the ability to: Verify your cluster is working correctly Inspect topics and partitions Debug consumer lag issues Replay messages from specific offsets Reset consumer groups during incident recovery All CLI tools are in Kafka’s bin/ directory. In Docker, run them with docker exec: docker exec kafka <tool> <args> kafka-topics.sh: Managing Topics Create a Topic docker exec kafka kafka-topics.