Kafka Consumer Groups & Partition Rebalancing Visualised

Watch exactly what happens when a consumer joins or leaves a group — partition reassignment, group coordinator election, and how to configure session.timeout.ms to avoid unnecessary rebalances.

Animated Explanation

STEP 1 / 5

Consumer group protocol: Each group has a group coordinator (one of the Kafka brokers). Consumers send heartbeats to this coordinator. If no heartbeat arrives within session.timeout.ms (default 45s), the coordinator marks the consumer dead and triggers a rebalance.

Key Concepts

Group protocolPartition assignmentRebalance triggersStatic membership

🎯 You'll Learn

Design stable consumer groups and minimize rebalances

📋 Prerequisites

None

Stack

Apache Kafka

2 tutorials

Progress

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Building a Real-Time Pipeline with Kafka Streams

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