Igor Buzatovic takes us through a fairly advanced topic in Apache Kafka:
If you are familiar with basic Kafka concepts, you know that you can parallelize message consumption by simply adding more consumers in the same group. However, that approach is more suitable for horizontal scaling where you add new consumers by adding new application nodes (containers, VMs, and even bare metal instances).
A multi-consumer approach can also be used for vertical scaling, but this requires additional management of consumer instances and accompanying consuming threads in the application code. Using multiple consumer instances introduces additional network traffic as well as more work for the consumer group coordinator since it has to manage more consumers.
While these concerns may not be strong enough reasons for switching from a thread per consumer to a multi-threaded model, there are use cases in which a multi-threaded model has compelling advantages.
Read the whole thing.