Apache Kafka Data Access Semantics: Consumers and Membership | Confluent

This post explains the fundamental concepts of Kafka consumers, consumer groups, and offsets. It details how consumers use FetchRequests to pull data, the role of offsets in tracking progress, and how the `__consumer_offsets` topic is used for storing committed offsets. It also introduces the concept of consumer group rebalances and the membership API, highlighting the importance of these mechanisms for scalability, availability, and consistency in distributed data processing.