When a record is assigned an offset, that offset permanently identifies that record. The offset that identified that record will never be reused for another record.

In order to begin consuming records, a consumer must specify the topic and partition to consume from, as well as the offset into the partition where it should begin reading.

The offset of a record is its total position within its parent partition.

There are multiple ways that an offset may be derived in more convenient ways:

• Directly, as an absolute index into the partition, starting from zero
• As a relative distance from the beginning of the partition
• As a relative distance from the end of the partition

There is a difference between an absolute offset and a relative offset from the beginning of the partition.

When consumers specify a relative offset, the offset given by the consumer is used to calculate the actual total offset into the partition.

When a record is assigned an offset, that offset permanently identifies that record, but this does not necessarily mean that the record will always be available.

If a partition has a retention policy that causes it to begin deleting records from the beginning, then the relative-from-beginning offset will count forward from the oldest record that is still available.