Hi, Kafka 2.8.x changed the behaviour of auto topic creation (KAFKA-9751) so that it's now done asynchronously by a forwarded request to the controller rather than being immediately started by the broker that received the MetadataRequest. In 2.7.x and earlier the client used to get LEADER_NOT_AVAILABLE on the first MetadataResponse as the topic creation was immediately in-progress and the partitions and leaders were just being assigned. With 2.8.x onward, instead they now get UNKNOWN_TOPIC_OR_PARTITION until the Controller has actioned the create. That seems fine and is easy to handle.
However, historically the __consumer_offsets topic was special cased such that it would get auto-created on a Metadata request even if normal topic auto-creation (`auto.create.topics.enable`) was disabled in the broker. Does anyone know if something has changed there? If I startup a brand new empty 2.8.x cluster and just send MetadataRequests for the __consumer_offsets topic I always get UNKNOWN_TOPIC_OR_PARTITION responses and the auto-creation doesn't seem to ever get actioned for that alone. As you'd expect, if I start up a consumer group the JoinGroup is sufficient to cause the __consumer_offsets topic to be created. On 2.7.x and earlier, just sending MetadataRequests is sufficient for the __consumer_offsets topic to be created. The behaviour can be observed using (e.g.,) kcat (neƩ kafkacat) after starting a brand new cluster with auto.create.topics.enable=false: > kcat -L -b localhost:29091,localhost:29092,localhost:29093 -t > __consumer_offsets -d metadata,topic And no auto-creation ever happens despite allowAutoCreate true in the Metadata request body: Kafka (Metadata v4 Request) Length: 42 API Key: Metadata (3) API Version: 4 Correlation ID: 3 Client ID: rdkafka Topic Topic Name: __consumer_offsets Allow Auto Topic Creation: True Is this a regression or an intentional change in behaviour? I couldn't find any reference to this in the changelog / release notes. Best regards, Dom -- Dominic Evans IBM Software Group, Hursley Park, UK