Kafka Pull Model

In contrary to what RabbitMQ offers, kafka allows only consumers to pull messages from the brokers.

Kafka consumers send a fetch message which is then responded by the broker with 1 or more available messages.

For each fetch request, the broker will return one fetch response which can indicate that there are more messages available. In this case, the consumer must send a new fetch request to get the remaining messages.

Request supports multiple partitions

In one fetch request, the consumer can request for data from multiple partitions as well.

In this case, the broker will group messages from requested partitions and return.