Incremental Cooperative Rebalancing in Apache Kafka

What this post added

Details the challenges of the existing 'stop-the-world' rebalancing protocol in Kafka clients, such as scaling issues, multi-tenancy disruptions, and Kubernetes node failures. Introduces the concept of Incremental Cooperative Rebalancing, emphasizing its incremental and cooperative nature. Explains the implementation in Kafka Connect, illustrating scenarios like a new worker joining, an existing worker bouncing, and an existing worker leaving permanently, highlighting how unaffected tasks continue to run and how rebalancing delays are utilized for graceful recovery.