Understanding Kafka Consumer: Delivery Guarantees, Rebalance Mechanisms, Partition Assignment, and Thread Safety
This article provides a comprehensive guide to KafkaConsumer, covering message delivery semantics (at‑most‑once, at‑least‑once, exactly‑once), practical exactly‑once implementations, consumer rebalance triggers and strategies, partition assignment algorithms, thread‑safety considerations, and detailed Java code examples of the consumer workflow.