I am trying to understand and document how producers & consumers will/should behave in case of node failures in 0.8. I know there are various other threads that discuss this but I wanted to bring all the information together in one post. This should help people building producers & consumers in other languages as well. Here is my understanding of how Kafak behaves in failures:
Case 1: If a node fails that wasn't a leader for any partitions No impact on consumers and producers Case 2: If a leader node fails but another in sync node can be become a leader All publishing to and consumption from the partition whose leader failed will momentarily stop until a new leader is elected. Producers should implement retry logic in such cases (and in fact in all kinds of errors from Kafka) and consumers can (depending on your use case) either continue to other partitions after retrying decent number of times (in case you are fetching from partitions in round robin fashion) or keep retrying until leader is available. Case 3: If a leader node goes down and no other in sync nodes are available In this case, publishing to and consumption from the partition will halt and will not resume until the faulty leader node recovers. In this case, producers should fail the publish request after retrying decent number of times and provide a callback to the client of the producer to take corrective action. Consumers again have a choice to continue to other partitions after retrying decent number of times (in case you are fetching from partitions in round robin fashion) or keep retrying until leader is available. In case of latter, the entire consumer process will halt until the faulty node recovers. Do I have this right?
