Consumer is a term used to describe a person or system that utilizes the functionality provided by a service or API. In the context of software development, a consumer is typically another application, service, or system that integrates with and relies upon the functionality exposed by a service provider, often through REST APIs or message queues like Kafka.

How to use it in a sentence

• "As the lead developer on the analytics platform, it's critical that you consider the needs of the consumers - the BI team will need access to real-time data streams, while the data science group requires hourly batch exports in Parquet format."

• "I know you'd rather be optimizing your Kubernetes configs, but we need to prioritize the new endpoint for the mobile app consumer - they're launching in two sprints and currently don't have access to user profile data."

If you actually want to learn more...

• The Pact.io blog has some great articles diving deep into consumer-driven contract testing, including tutorials on setting it up in various languages and frameworks.

• For a broader look at the role of consumers in microservice architectures, check out this article from NGINX - it covers key concepts like service discovery, API gateways, and consumer-driven design.

• If you really want to geek out on consumer-provider interactions in distributed systems, have a look at this paper on Confluent's site about using consumer-driven contracts to test Kafka integrations.

Note: the Developer Dictionary is in Beta. Please direct feedback to skye@statsig.com.