What is a Kafka Consumer?

A Kafka Consumer reads messages from one or more topic partitions. Key concepts: Offset: the consumer tracks its position in each partition via the offset — the sequence number of the last processed message. Consumers commit offsets to the __consumer_offsets internal topic. Auto-commit: by default, offsets are committed automatically every 5 seconds. Manual commit: commit after processing for exactly-once-like behavior. Pull model: Kafka uses a pull model — consumers request messages from the broker at their own pace, preventing overload. Consumer Group: consumers in a group share the topic partitions. Rebalancing: when a consumer joins or leaves a group, partitions are redistributed. Seek: consumers can reposition their offset to replay or skip messages.