Kafka Consumer Patterns: What You Actually Need in Production

Working with Apache Kafka often gives a false sense of simplicity. Producing events is easy. Consuming them correctly-under failure, scale, and real-world constraints is where most systems break down. Kafka does not guarantee correctness by itself. It gives you primitives like offsets, partitions, and consumer groups. The guarantees you get depend entirely on how you design your consumer. This article focuses on the patterns that matter in practice, and the tradeoffs behind them. At-Most-Once vs