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Jackson Williams
Jackson Williams

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Get Started with Kafka in 10 Minutes: Build a Java Consumer

Get ready to unlock the power of Kafka by learning how to build a simple yet effective Kafka Consumer in this in-depth guide. This consumer will retrieve messages from the Kafka Producer you created in the previous tutorial, and we'll walk you through the process of handling records from a Kafka topic.

Discover how Kafka Consumers within the same group distribute and share partitions, ensuring each consumer group receives its own duplicate of the same data.

Jean-Paul Azar, a Cloudurable expert, offers Kafka training sessions, consulting services, support, and assistance in setting up Kafka clusters in AWS.

Prerequisites for This Tutorial

Before diving in, make sure you:

  • Know how to operate Kafka from the command line
  • Understand Kafka clustering and failover fundamentals
  • Have created a Kafka Producer in Java (check out our previous tutorial for a step-by-step guide)

This tutorial builds upon our previous Kafka Tutorial: Creating a Kafka Producer in Java, where we developed a simple Java example that created a Kafka producer. We also created a replicated Kafka topic called my-example-topic and sent records (both synchronously and asynchronously) using the Kafka producer. Now, the consumer you're about to create will consume those messages. For more insights on data engineering, visit our website.

Building a Kafka Consumer

Similar to the producer, you'll need to specify bootstrap servers, define a group.id, designate a Kafka record key deserializer and a record value deserializer, and subscribe the consumer to the topic you created in the producer tutorial.

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