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Last, the admin client is used within the group leader to collect topic metadata and to create internal topics if necessary. If those calls fails, they are retried within Kafka Streams re-using the admin client's retries config. Because admin retries will be deprecated, we should not re-use it any longer for this purpose. The current retry loop is across multiple admin client calls that are issues interleaved. This interleaved retry logic should be preserved. Furthermore, we should not retry infinitely to avoid that the leader is stuck forever (even if it would be removed from the group by the group coordinator after a timeout anyway that is set to max.poll.interval.ms). To avoid to drop out of the consumer group, the retry loop should be stopped before we hit the timeout. We propose to use a 50% threshold, i.e., half of max.poll.interval.ms.

Compatibility, Deprecation, and Migration Plan

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