Kafka in Action

5 Consumers: Unlocking data

This chapters covers

• Exploring the consumer and how it works
• Using consumer groups to coordinate reading data from topics
• Learning about offsets and how to use them
• Examining various configuration options that change consumer behavior

In our previous chapter, we started writing data into our Kafka system. However, as you know, that is only one part of the story. Consumers get the data from Kafka and provide those values to other systems or applications. Because consumers are clients that exist outside of brokers, they can be written in various programming languages just like producer clients. Take note that when we look at how things work in this chapter, we will try to lean towards the defaults of the Java consumer ...