Data loss is one of the biggest problems developers face when building distributed systems. Whether due to network issues or code bugs, data loss can have serious consequences for enterprises. In this article, we'll look at how to build Kafka listeners with Spring Boot and how to use Kafka's acknowledgment mechanisms to prevent data loss and ensure the reliability of our systems.
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka is a distributed message platform used to store and deliver messages. Once a message is written to Kafka, it will be kept there according to a retention policy. The consumer groups mechanism is used to read out messages. The offset for each consumer group is used to understand the stage of message processing and to keep track of the progress of each consumer group in reading messages from a partition. It allows each consumer group to independently read messages from a topic and resume reading from where it left off in case of failures or restarts. In a simplified way, this can be represented as follows: