Designing Replay-Safe CDC Pipelines With Kafka, Debezium, and Recovery Contracts

Change data capture (CDC) pipelines look straightforward on paper: capture database changes, publish them to Kafka, and update downstream systems. The difficulty starts when events are duplicated, consumers restart, projections drift, or a team needs to replay months of history without corrupting the state it is trying to recover. A reliable CDC design has to account for those failure modes from the beginning.