What do you mean "no concept...of asking?" During consumption, you must either auto-commit offsets, or manually commit them. If you don't, you'll get the same events over and over again.

Or you can just store your next offset in a DB and tell the consumer to read from that offset - the Kafka offset storage topic is a convenient implementation of the most common usage pattern, but it's not mandatory to use - and again, the broker doesn't do anything with that information when serving you data.

Acking in an MQ is very different.

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