Apache Kafka Practice

Message idempotence is an important feature in Apache Kafka that ensures that messages can be produced multiple times without causing unintended effects. When message producers enable idempotence, it ensures that even if a message is sent multiple times, it will only be recorded once in the log. This property significantly benefits message producers because it allows for safe reprocessing of messages.

In situations where a producer might experience a failure after sending a message but before receiving an acknowledgment, it could accidentally resend the same message. Without idempotence, this would lead to duplicate messages being processed, which could corrupt data or lead to unintended side effects in the application. With idempotence enabled, any duplicate messages sent during such retries will be filtered out, and only the intended message will be recorded in the Kafka topic, preserving the integrity of the data and ensuring that the system behaves predictably.

The other choices do not accurately reflect how message idempotence operates. Minimizing network latency and eliminating the need for acknowledgments are not direct benefits of idempotence; those aspects involve different features of Kafka and its overall architecture. Increasing data size for faster processing is also unrelated, as idempotence focuses on handling message integrity, not on performance metrics like data size.