MESSAGE OFFSET
- Critical concept to understand because it is how consumers can read messages at their own pace and process them independently.
- Place holder, It is like a bookmark that maintains the last read position
- In the case of kafka topic, it is the last read message.
- The offset is entirely established and maintained by the consumer.Since the consumer is entirely responsible for reading the messages and processing them on its own.
- Keep track of what it has read and has not read
- Offset refers to a message identifier
STEPS INVOLVED
- When a consumer wishes to read from a topic, it must establish a connection with a Broker
- After establishing the connection, the consumer will decide what messages it wants to consume
- If the consumer has not previously read from the topic , or it has to start over, it will issue a statement to read from the beginning of the topic (Consumer establishing that its message offset for the topic is 0)