What is the purpose of a Consumer Group in Apache Kafka?

A Consumer Group in Apache Kafka is used to organize a group of consumers that jointly read data from a topic. Each consumer in the group receives a unique set of topic partitions, which allows load distribution and parallel message processing. It also provides scalability and fault tolerance: if one consumer fails, its partitions are redistributed among the remaining consumers. Thus, a Consumer Group enables load balancing and guarantees that each message is processed by exactly one consumer in the group.