I'm considering using Apache Kafka and I could not find any information about durable subscriptions. Let's say I have expiration of 5 seconds for messages in my partition. Now if consumer fails and reconnects after 5 seconds, the message he missed will be gone. Even worse, he wont know that he missed a message. The durable subscription pattern solves this by saving the message for the consumer that failed or was disconnected. Is similar feature implemented in Kafka?
This is not supported by Kafka. But you can of course always increase your retention time, and thus limit the probability that a consumer misses messages.
Furthermore, if you set auto.offset.reset to none you will get an exception that informs you if a consumer misses any messages. Hence, it is possible to get informed if this happens.
Last but not least, it might be possible, to use a compacted topic -- this would ensure, that messages are not deleted until you explicitly write a so-called tombstone message. Note, that records must have unique keys to use a compacted topic.