Consumer Groups: Consumers read data as part of a consumer group. Each consumer in a group exclusively reads from specific partitions, ensuring no overlap. The number of consumers cannot exceed the number of partitions, as this would leave some consumers inactive.
Offsets Management: Kafka tracks the offset, or the last record read by each consumer group, storing this information in a special Kafka topic called __consumer_offsets. Consumers should commit their offsets after processing data. If a consumer fails, it can resume from the last committed offset, ensuring no data is missed.