What problem does offset management solve? What would happen without it?

Offset management solves the problem of tracking the consumer's position in a data stream, for example, when working with queue systems or streaming platforms (Kafka, RabbitMQ).

Without offset management, the consumer would not know where to continue reading after a restart or failure. This would lead to:

• Re-reading already processed messages (data duplication).
• Loss of messages if the read position is not saved.

Using offset management, the system saves the current read position (offset) for each consumer. When restarted, the consumer begins reading from the saved offset, ensuring correct data processing and guaranteeing that no message is missed or processed twice.

For example, in Kafka, the offset is stored in a special topic or external storage, and the consumer periodically commits the current offset.