Kafka INVALID_FETCH_SESSION_EPOCH

There is a concept of fetch session, introduced within KIP-227 since 1.1.0 release: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-227%3A+Introduce+Incremental+FetchRequests+to+Increase+Partition+Scalability

Kafka brokers, which are replica followers, fetch messages from the leader. In order to avoid sending full metadata each time for all partitions, only those partitions which changed are sent within the same fetch session.

When we look into Kafka's code, we can see an example, when this is returned:

if (session.epoch != expectedEpoch) {
        info(s"Incremental fetch session ${session.id} expected epoch $expectedEpoch, but " +
          s"got ${session.epoch}.  Possible duplicate request.")
        new FetchResponse(Errors.INVALID_FETCH_SESSION_EPOCH, new FetchSession.RESP_MAP, 0, session.id)
      } else {

src: https://github.com/axbaretto/kafka/blob/ab2212c45daa841c2f16e9b1697187eb0e3aec8c/core/src/main/scala/kafka/server/FetchSession.scala#L493

In general, if you don't have thousands of partitions and, at the same time, this doesn't happen very often, then it shouldn't worry you.

It seems as this might be caused by Kafka-8052 issue, which was fixed for Kafka 2.3.0