Consumer API: Configuration and Best Practices
Learn about the key configuration parameters of the Kafka Consumer API.
Common configurations
There are many configurations for the Kafka Consumer API. Let’s look at some of the most important ones. In the process, we will also cover some of the best practices of using the Consumer API.
Let’s start with some of the commonly used Consumer API configurations.
The bootstrap.servers configuration
This configuration specifies the list of Kafka brokers the consumer should connect to. The value should be a comma-separated list of the hostname and port pairs.
The group.id configuration
This configuration is required for a consumer to join a consumer group. Consumers with the same group.id configuration belong to the same consumer group and are assigned partitions of the subscribed topics. Each partition can only be assigned to one consumer within a group. If multiple consumers share the same group.id configuration, Kafka will automatically perform a rebalance to reassign partitions to the available consumers within the group.
We use descriptive and unique group IDs for each consumer group to ensure clarity and avoid conflicts.
Properties props = new Properties();props.setProperty(ConsumerConfig.BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS_CONFIG, "localhost:9092");props.setProperty(ConsumerConfig.GROUP_ID_CONFIG, "data-archival-app");
Offset management
The following parameters should be used to configure the offset management aspects of the consumer application.
The enable.auto.commit configuration
This configuration determines whether the consumer will automatically commit the offsets of consumed messages back to Kafka. If set to true, the consumer will commit offsets periodically based on the interval specified by the auto.commit.interval.ms configuration. If set to false, the consumer must manually commit offsets using the commit() method. It is important to note that enabling auto-commit may result in data loss if the consumer dies before the commit.
We can disable auto-commit if we need more control over the offset management or if we’re processing large amounts of data. We can commit offsets manually, after the processing is complete, to ensure data integrity.
The auto.commit.interval.ms configuration
This configuration specifies the frequency at which the ...