Read Kafka topic in a Spark batch job

Question

I'm writing a Spark (v1.6.0) batch job which reads from a Kafka topic.
For this I can use org.apache.spark.streaming.kafka.KafkaUtils#createRDD however, I need to set the offsets for all the partitions and also need to store them somewhere (ZK? HDFS?) to know from where to start the next batch job.

What is the right approach to read from Kafka in a batch job?

I'm also thinking about writing a streaming job instead, which reads from auto.offset.reset=smallest and saves the checkpoint to HDFS and then in the next run it starts from that.

But in this case how can I just fetch once and stop streaming after the first batch?

Answer 1

createRDD is the right approach for reading a batch from kafka.

To query for info about the latest / earliest available offsets, look at KafkaCluster.scala methods getLatestLeaderOffsets and getEarliestLeaderOffsets. That file was private, but should be public in the latest versions of spark.