I've noticed that, on my own machine, if I start a kafka broker, then create a topic, then I stop that server and restart it, the topic I created is still kept.
However, on restarts, it looks like the topic is deleted. Its also possible that the default retention policy of 24 hours causes the messages to be deleted. However, even if the messages are deleted, shouldn't the topic itself be preserved? What would happen if there are no new messages posted to a topic for a week, but I still have consumers listening to that topic? If the topic is deleted, will I need to restart my consumer? This seems like a pain.