Listeners can be configured to receive the entire batch of messages returned by the consumer.poll() operation, rather than one at a time.
When explicitly assigning partitions, you can now configure the initial offset relative to the current position for the consumer group, rather than absolute or relative to the current end.
You can now seek the position of each topic/partition. This can be used to set the initial position during initialization when group management is in use and Kafka assigns the partitions. You can also seek when an idle container is detected, or at any arbitrary point in your application’s execution. See the section called “Seeking to a Specific Offset” for more information.