I'm interested in having my consumer service start consuming the most recent message rather than the message corresponding to the last offset stored. For instance, if the kafka consumer service is down for a period of time, I would like to skip over all messages since the last recorded offset and begin consuming from the most recent message.
According to the following, it seems I have to use SimpleConsumer to achieve this? Seems like this would be difficult to manage in a "load balanced" consumer scenario (federation of consumers in the same group consuming the same topic). https://groups.google.com/group/kafka-dev/browse_thread/thread/ee7fe5f8eef49a4d/a4469233880a7f76?lnk=gst&q=offset#a4469233880a7f76 Any additional insight appreciated.
