How Spark Structured Streaming handles backpressure?

Handling back pressure is needed only is push based mechanisms. Kafka consumers are pull based, spark will pull next batch of records only when current batch is finished processing and saving. If processing & saving is delayed in spark, it won't pull new batch of records so no need of back pressure handling.

maxOffsetsPerTrigger can change the number of records processed per spark batch set, backpressure.enabled changes rate of receiving, but that's not same as back pressure where you go and tell the source to slow dow.

If you mean dynamically changing the size of each internal batch in Structured Streaming, then NO. There are not receiver-based sources in Structured Streaming, so that's totally not necessary. From another point of view, Structured Streaming cannot do real backpressure, because, such as, Spark cannot tell other applications to slow down the speed of pushing data into Kafka.

Generally, Structured Streaming will try to process data as fast as possible by default. There are options in each source to allow to control the processing rate, such as maxFilesPerTrigger in File source, and maxOffsetsPerTrigger in Kafka source. Read the following links for more details:

http://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/structured-streaming-programming-guide.html#input-sources http://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/structured-streaming-kafka-integration.html