// the find
bsm/sarama-cluster
Cluster extensions for Sarama, the Go client library for Apache Kafka 0.9 [DEPRECATED]
A consumer group library for Apache Kafka written in Go, wrapping the Sarama client to add partition rebalancing and offset management before Sarama supported these natively. It is officially deprecated — Sarama >= v1.19.0 includes native consumer group support that supersedes everything here. There is no reason to adopt this in a new project.
- The two-mode design (multiplexed vs. partitioned) was a genuinely useful API choice that made per-partition processing easy without wiring goroutines manually.
- Notification channel for rebalance events gave callers visibility into group rebalancing that the native Sarama API still requires extra plumbing to replicate cleanly.
- 1000+ stars and 218 forks over its active lifetime means the code is battle-tested — bugs that surface in high-throughput Kafka workloads were actually found and fixed.
- Deprecated since 2018 and last touched January 2020 — adopting this means inheriting a dead dependency that will not receive security fixes or Kafka protocol updates.
- Native Sarama consumer groups handle more edge cases (e.g., static group membership, incremental cooperative rebalancing) that this library never supported and never will.
- Uses Dep (Gopkg.toml/Gopkg.lock) for dependency management, which has been dead since 2020 — any project using Go modules will have friction integrating this.
- The OffsetOldest footgun buried in the troubleshooting section is a sign of API ergonomics that were never fully resolved — a common trap that bit real users in production.