What is the primary function of the Kafka Consumer?

What is the primary function of the Kafka Consumer?

• A. subscribe()
• B. poll()
• C. connect()
• D. produce()

Answer: (B)

The core action of a Kafka Consumer is to pull data from Kafka by calling poll(). After you create a consumer and subscribe to topics, you repeatedly invoke poll with a timeout to fetch new records from the broker for all partitions you’re consuming. The poll call returns the batch of records you can process and also drives the consumer’s heartbeat and offset management, keeping you in the same consumer group and ensuring progress through the stream. subscribe() is used to declare which topics you want to read from, but it doesn’t retrieve messages by itself. connect() isn’t a direct consumer API method for fetching data, and produce() is a producer operation used to send messages, not to read them.

The core action of a Kafka Consumer is to pull data from Kafka by calling poll(). After you create a consumer and subscribe to topics, you repeatedly invoke poll with a timeout to fetch new records from the broker for all partitions you’re consuming. The poll call returns the batch of records you can process and also drives the consumer’s heartbeat and offset management, keeping you in the same consumer group and ensuring progress through the stream.

subscribe() is used to declare which topics you want to read from, but it doesn’t retrieve messages by itself. connect() isn’t a direct consumer API method for fetching data, and produce() is a producer operation used to send messages, not to read them.