On the same lines of the previous chapter on Kafka producers, we will start by understanding the responsibilities of Kafka consumers apart from consuming messages from Kafka queues.
Let's look at them one by one:
- Subscribing to a topic: Consumer operations start with subscribing to a topic. If consumer is part of a consumer group, it will be assigned a subset of partitions from that topic. Consumer process would eventually read data from those assigned partitions. You can think of topic subscription as a registration process to read data from topic partitions.
- Consumer offset position: Kafka, unlike any other queues, does not maintain message offsets. Every consumer is responsible for ...
