Case of sudden Kafka lag drop
Posted on 01 Mar 2025
Recently we faced an interesting issue in our data pipeline where we observed Kafka consumer lag suddenly dropping whenever it reached a certain threshold. This behavior was unexpected and potentially concerning, as consumer lag—the difference between the latest message produced and the message currently being processed by consumers—should typically decrease gradually as consumers process messages. The Problem Our application was relatively simple, with two instances of pods running in Kubernetes. Since we didn’t need high...