Consumer Group
Noun · Development
Definitions
A set of consumers that cooperatively consume a Kafka topic, with each partition assigned to exactly one consumer in the group. Adding consumers (up to the partition count) increases throughput. Multiple consumer groups can independently consume the same topic. If a consumer fails, its partitions are rebalanced to surviving members.
In plain English: A group of workers that share the work of reading from a Kafka topic, automatically rebalancing when members join or leave.
Example: "The analytics consumer group processes the events topic independently from the notifications consumer group -- each gets all messages at their own pace."