Consuming Messages from Kafka

Kafka Consumers are applications that read data from Kafka topics. They subscribe to one or more topics and process the messages as they arrive.

• Consumers are the 'listeners' in your Kafka ecosystem.
• They pull data from Kafka brokers, rather than having data pushed to them.
• Essential for building real-time data pipelines and analytics systems.

Consumers often work together in a consumer group. This is a collection of consumer instances that share a common group.id.

• Scalability: Messages from a topic's partitions are distributed among consumers in the same group, allowing parallel processing.
• Fault Tolerance: If a consumer instance fails, its assigned partitions are automatically reassigned to other active consumers in the group.
• Each message in a partition is delivered to only one consumer within a group.