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When consumer subscribes to a non-existent topic, it does not have control over whether the topic is automatically created or not. We have the broker configuration auto.create.topics.enable that controls topic auto-creation globally. If there is a lag between the consumers and producers starting up, we usually do not want the consumer to be able to automatically create the topic as this will use the default number of partitions and replication factor. Consumers should thus have the ability to be able to disable auto topic creation, if needed.

To work around the lack of such a configuration, consumers avoid subscribing to specific topics and use wildcards instead, like in Streams. This is not optimal as it means clients will ask for and receive metadata for topics and partitions in the cluster, which could be large.

Public Interfaces

We will add a new consumer configuration auto.create.topics.enable which is similar in spirit to its broker counterpart. If set to false, the topic being subscribed to will not be auto-created, regardless of what this configuration is set to on the broker.

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