Keys are necessary if you require strong ordering or grouping for messages that share the same key. If you require that messages with the same key are always seen in the correct order, attaching a key to messages will ensure messages with the same key always go to the same partition in a topic. Kafka guarantees order within a partition, but not across partitions in a topic, so alternatively not providing a key - which will result in round-robin distribution across partitions - will not maintain such order.