A batch is just a collection of messages, all of which are being produced to the same topic and partition. An individual round trip across the network for each message would result in excessive overhead, and collecting messages together into a batch reduces this. Of course, this is a trade-off between latency and throughput: the larger the batches, the more messages that can be handled per unit of time, but the longer it takes an individual message to propagate (Page 5) #✂️