[geomesa-dev] Kafka datastore contribution request

[Chad Phillips <chad.c.phillips@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'd like to contribute a feature for the geomesa kafka datastore libraries that exposes the auto offset reset configuration in the Kafka consumer, when using the live feature source.  To preserve the existing default behaviour, this would be set to "largest" but, a user could also set it to "smallest" in order to start reading from the beginning of the topic, re-populating the cache with any existing features upon initialization of the feature source.  This is useful in situations where a user is expecting low volume data or highly volatile data where the data in the Kafka topic backing the feature source is only being kept for a short period of time.  In both of those situations, having the cache repopulate upon initialization (and continuously receive updates as they come in after that) makes it easy for a user to continue consuming data after restarting their system, or restarting GeoServer (for example), without having to use the replay feature source in addition to the live feature source.