Notify consumer about new events in Kafka topics

Question

Is there a way to notify consumer about the new events being published to kafka topics which consumer has subscribed to while consumer is not actively listening? I know the question itself seems confusing but i was thinking if it is really necessary to have one process running continuously in order to consume messages. I think it will make consumer process easier if we know when the message is available to read. Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Consumers read messages by polling the topic, so fundamentally, you must have a process running continuously. If the consumer does not poll within the value of the property max.poll.interval.ms , the consumer will leave the group. A hallmark feature of event-driven architectures is that consumers and producers are decoupled; the consumer does not know whether the producer even exists. Therefore, there is no way to know when a message is available to read without actively polling.