Apache Kafka Data Access Semantics: Consumers and Membership

The text discusses how Apache Kafka's consuming model works, focusing on its distributed systems challenges like data consistency, failover, and load balancing. It explains the notion of consumers and consumer groups, as well as the role of Kafka brokers in managing consumer groups. Additionally, it delves into the rebalance protocol that ensures fault tolerance against consumer application failures. The text also mentions recent improvements to this protocol and highlights some features of Apache Kafka 3.8.0.