Not only can Kafka handle multiple consumers, but durable message retention means that consumers do not always need to work in real time. Messages are committed to disk, and will be stored with configurable retention rules.

What is Kafka durability?

Apache Kafka is able to handle many terabytes of data without incurring much at all in the way of overhead. Kafka is highly durable. Kafka persists the messages on the disks, which provides intra-cluster replication. This makes for a highly durable messaging system.

What is the purpose of retention period in Kafka cluster?

The Kafka cluster retains all published messages—whether or not they have been consumed—for a configurable period of time. For example if the log retention is set to two days, then for the two days after a message is published it is available for consumption, after which it will be discarded to free up space.