Kafka: an eager rebalance stops the entire consumer group

The default assignment strategy revokes every partition from every member, then reassigns from scratch. One instance restarting halts consumption group-wide. Cooperative sticky rebalancing only moves the partitions that must move.

• Kafka: linger.ms=0 does not mean every record is sent alone
• Kafka: log compaction never removes the last record for a key, including a tombstone
• Kafka: consumer lag on one partition is skew, not a scaling problem
• Kafka: a read_committed consumer stalls behind one open transaction
• Kafka: a non-idempotent producer reorders on retry
• Kafka: adding partitions breaks key ordering permanently

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Published 2026-08-25

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