title: Kafka Consumer: How to start consuming from the last message in Python
body: <p>I am using Kafka 0.8.1 and Kafka python-0.9.0. In my setup, I have 2 kafka brokers setup. When I run my kafka consumer, I can see it retrieving messages from the queue and keeping track of offsets for both the brokers. Everything works great!</p>
  
  <p>My issue is that when I restart the consumer, it starts consuming messages from the beginning. What I was expecting was that upon restart, the consumer would start consuming messages from where it left off before it died.</p>
  
  <p>I did try keeping track of the message offsets in Redis and then calling consumer.seek before reading a message from the queue to ensure that I was only getting the messages that I hadn't seen before. While this worked, before deploying this solution, I wanted to check with y'all ... perhaps there is something I am misunderstanding about Kafka or the python-Kafka client. Seems like the consumer being able to restart reading from where it left off is pretty basic functionality.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks! </p>