Conquer Apache Kafka 2025 – Dive into Data Streaming Dominance!

The primary role of a Consumer in Kafka is to subscribe to topics and process the messages that are published to those topics. Consumers are integral to the Kafka architecture as they enable applications to retrieve and handle the data that is streamed into Kafka. When a Consumer subscribes to a topic, it listens for incoming messages and can then perform various operations on those messages, such as transforming the data, saving it to a database, or triggering alerts based on specific conditions.

This functionality is critical because Kafka operates on a publish-subscribe model, where Producers send messages to topics, and Consumers consume those messages. This setup allows for scalable processing of data streams, enabling multiple Consumers to read from the same topic concurrently or at different times.

The other functions described in the options do not accurately represent the role of a Consumer. For instance, publishing messages to topics is the job of a Producer, not a Consumer. Managing Kafka brokers involves administrative tasks related to the Kafka cluster and is performed typically by administrators rather than Consumers. Lastly, while message replication across partitions is a fundamental feature of Kafka's distributed system designed for fault tolerance, this task is managed by Kafka itself and not by Consumers. Therefore, the most fitting description of a Consumer's function in Kafka is the one that highlights