> A KafkaConsumer, by contrast, will happily connect to a jar of applesauce14 and return successful, empty result sets for every call to consumer.poll. This makes it surprisingly difficult to tell the difference between “everything is fine and I’m up to date” versus “the cluster is on fire”, and led to significant confusion in our tests.

This tickled my funny bone. Never expected humor in a Jepsen writeup. Kudos!