Common consumer patterns and use cases

The following pages detail standard patterns for Streams reading messages from Kafka.

These patterns have the following assumptions:
  • One consumer operator consumes messages from one single topic with a string message, for example a JSON message
  • For a production environment, the consumer starts consuming at the default start position
  • Kafka guarantees no ordering of messages accross partitions.
Consume all partitions
A single KafkaConsumer operator consumes all messages from a topic regardless of the number of partitions.
Kafka consumer group
Multiple KafkaConsumer operators consume from the same topic(s) where the topic partitions are automatically distributed over the consumer operators.
Assigned partitions
Multiple KafkaConsumer operators reading from the same topic(s).