Kafka Connect configuration and the "consumer." prefix - apache-kafka

Question

I was hoping to get some clarification on the kafka connect configuration properties here https://docs.confluent.io/current/connect/userguide.html
We were having issues connecting to our confluent connect cluster to our kafka connect instance. We had all our settings configured correctly from what i could tell and didn’t have any luck.
After extensive googling some discovered that prefixing the configuration properties with “consumer.” seems to fix the issue. There is a mention of that prefix here https://docs.confluent.io/current/connect/userguide.html#overriding-producer-and-consumer-settings
I am having a hard time understanding wrapping my head around the prefix and how the properties are picked up by connect and used. It was my assumption that the java api client used by kafka connect will pick up the connection properties from the properties file. It might have some hard coded configuration properties that can be overridden by specifying the values in the properties file. But, this is not correct? The doc linked above mentions
All new producer configs and new consumer configs can be overridden by prefixing them with producer. or consumer.
What are the new configs? The link on that page just takes me to the list of all the configs. The doc mentions
Occasionally, you may have an application that needs to adjust the default settings. One example is a standalone process that runs a log file connector
that as the use case for using the prefix override, but this is connect cluster, how does that use case apply? Appreciate your time if you have read thus far

Answer 1

The new prefix is probably misleading. Apache Kafka is currently at version 2.3, and back in 0.8 and 0.9 a "new" producer and consumer API was added. These are now just the standard producer and consumer, but the new prefix has hung around.
In terms of overriding configuration, it is as you say; you can prefix any of the standard consumer/producer configs in the Kafka Connect worker with consumer. (for a sink) or producer. (for a source).
Note that as of Apache Kafka 2.3 you can also override these per connector, as detailed in this post : https://www.confluent.io/blog/kafka-connect-improvements-in-apache-kafka-2-3

Answer 2

The Post is too old, but I'll answer it for people who will face he same difficulty:
New properties, they would like to say : any custom consumer or producer configs.
And there is two levels :
Worker side : the worker has a consumer to read configs, status and offsets of each connector and has a producer (to write status and offsets) [not confuse with __consumer_offsets topics : offset topic is only for source connector], so to override those configs:
consumer.* (example: consumer.max.poll.records=10)
producer.* (example: producer.batch.size=10000)
Connector Side : this one will inherit the worker config by default, and to override consumer/producer configs, we should use :
consumer.override.* (example: consumer.override.max.poll.records=100)
producer.override* (example: producer.override.batch.size=20000)