Hi all,
I'd like to get some feedback from the community on the following idea. Currently, to safely perform a consumer group offset reset, the consumer group must be inactive. In practice, for a production service, this means the entire service must be stopped to perform the reset. Depending on the service's criticality, this isn't always possible. The alternative is to build custom tooling for our Kafka clients that allows them to be shut down on request. However, developing this client-side tooling is expensive, and that cost multiplies when you need to support multiple programming languages. I understand why resetting offsets on an active consumer group is problematic. This leads me to wonder: what is the community's opinion on developing more advanced broker-side management for the consumer groups? In short, what if we could use the AdminClient to mark a specific consumer group as "inactive"? This state would then enable us to perform an offset reset safely, without ever needing to make changes or take actions on the client side. I appreciate that "marking a consumer group as inactive" is an abstract term, and there are many nuances and details to think through. At this point, I'm just looking for super-early feedback from more experienced Kafka developers on whether this general idea makes sense. If it does, my team and I would be very interested in helping to deliver this feature. We can start working on a KIP to share with the community. We would also appreciate any early pointers on how to approach this if you think it's a viable idea. Thanks, Levani
