Consumer Group Assignment

Question

Let’s say I have a Consumer Group that consumes from:

Topic a with 3 partitions

Topic b with 2 partitions

There are a total of 2 topics and 6 partitions.

If I assign 3 consumers to the group, will the third one be idle - with the default assignment strategy, since there’s only 2 topics?

Answer 1

Each consumer will be assigned partitions, regardless of the number of topics it's subscribed to, unless you have more consumers in the group than total partitions