Does Kafka guarantee message read order consistency?

In Apache Kafka, message order is guaranteed within a single partition. That is, if messages are published to the same partition, the consumer will read them in the same order they were written.

However, Kafka does not guarantee global message order across the entire topic if the topic is divided into multiple partitions. Messages in different partitions can be processed and read in parallel and in different orders.

Therefore, to ensure sequential reading of messages in the order of publication, you need to use a single partition or implement logic that takes partitioning into account.