Does Kafka support request response messaging
<p>I am investigating Kafka 9 as a hobby project and completed a few "Hello World" type examples.</p>

<p>I have got to thinking about Real World Kafka applications based on request response messaging in general and more specifically how to link a Kafka request message to its response message.</p>

<p>I was thinking along the lines of using a generated UUID as the request message key and employ this request UUID as the associated response message key. Much the same type of mechanism that WebSphere MQ has message correlation id.</p>

<p>My end 2 end process would be.</p>

<p>1). Kafka client generates a random UUID and sends a single Kafka request message.
2). The server would consume this request message extract &amp; store the request UUID value
3). complete a Business Process using the message payload.
4). Respond with a response message that employs the stored UUID value from the request message as response message Key.
5). the Kafka client polls the response topic until it either timeouts or retrieves a message with the original request UUID value.</p>

<p>What I concerned about is that the Kafka Consumer polling will remove other clients messages from the response topic and increment the offsets making other clients fail.</p>

<p>Am I trying to apply Kafka in a use case it was never designed for?</p>

<p>Is it possible to implement request/response messaging in Kafka?</p>