rpk group delete

Delete groups from brokers.

Older versions of the Kafka protocol included a retention_millis field in offset commit requests. Group commits persisted for this retention and then eventually expired. Once all commits for a group expired, the group would be considered deleted.

The retention field was removed because it proved problematic for infrequently committing consumers: the offsets could be expired for a group that was still active. If clients use new enough versions of OffsetCommit (versions that have removed the retention field), brokers expire offsets only when the group is empty for offset.retention.minutes. Redpanda does not currently support that configuration (see #2904), meaning offsets for empty groups expire only when they are explicitly deleted.

You may want to delete groups to clean up offsets sooner than when they automatically are cleaned up, such as when you create temporary groups for quick investigation or testing. This command helps you do that.