Kafka Inconsistencies and the Silent Failures Behind Real-Time Decision Platforms

A field guide to the duplicate events, stale state, rebalances, and deployment traps that quietly distort real-time decisions — told through one decision that should have fired and didn’t. Note: This piece assumes working familiarity with Kafka and event-streaming fundamentals — topics, partitions, offsets, consumer groups, and delivery semantics. Terms are expanded on first use where it helps,…

This is an excerpt. The full article continues at Walmart Global Tech.