The only way to make sure A is consumed first would be to delay the consumption of message B for at least 15 minutes which would fly in the face of the principals of a true streaming platform so the short answer to your question is "no" because that would be batch processing not stream processing.
However, Kafka Streams does handle late arriving data. So if you had some analytics that computes results on a time window or a session window then Kafka streams will compute on the stream in real time (processing message B) and then later when message A arrives it will put that message back into the right temporal context and publish an amended result for the proper time/session window as if message B were consumed in the timestamp order before message A. The end result of this flow is that you eventually get the same results you would get in a batch processing system but with the added benefit of getting intermediary result at much lower latency. -hans /** * Hans Jespersen, Principal Systems Engineer, Confluent Inc. * h...@confluent.io (650)924-2670 */ On Sat, Mar 18, 2017 at 10:29 AM, Ali Akhtar <ali.rac...@gmail.com> wrote: > Is it possible to have Kafka Streams order messages correctly by their > timestamps, even if they arrived out of order? > > E.g, say Message A with a timestamp of 5:00 PM and Message B with a > timestamp of 5:15 PM, are sent. > > Message B arrives sooner than Message A, due to network issues. > > Is it possible to make sure that, across all consumers of Kafka Streams > (even if they are across different servers, but have the same consumer > group), Message A is consumed first, before Message B? > > Thanks. >
