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Explain the concept of consumer groups in Kafka. How do they affect message processing?

Spark/Big Datahard0.5 min readPremium
Frequency
Low
Asked at 1 company
Category
452
questions in Spark/Big Data
Difficulty Split
88E|81M|283H
in this category
Total Bank
1,863
across 7 categories
Asked at these companies
Citi
Key Concepts Tested
optimizationpartition
Expert AnswerPremium
109 wordsInterview-ready
**Why it matters**: At scale, design choices directly impact reliability, latency, and cost. Wrong decisions compound across jobs and teams. Kafka consumer groups: consumers in a group share topic partitions; each partition assigned to one consumer. Adding consumers increases parallelism (up to partition count); more consumers than partitions equals idle. Offsets tracked per group. Example: 6 partitions, 3 consumers yields 2 partitions each....
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