Kafka + Dead Letter Topic (DLT): catching failed messages

When a consumer crashes on specific messages (can't parse, validation fails, business logic errors), you don’t want to lose the data — or block the stream.

💡 The fix:

• Catch the error
• Redirect the message to a dead-letter-topic instead of crashing

Example (Python, confluent-kafka):

try:
    process(msg.value())
except Exception:
    dlq_producer.produce("dead-letter-topic", msg.value())

📌 Why it matters:

• You don’t lose data
• You can debug separately
• The main pipeline keeps flowing

Especially useful in ETL, file decompression, and format transformations.