Explain the role and purpose of the consumer component in Kafka architecture.

In Kafka architecture, the consumer component is responsible for receiving and processing messages from Kafka topics. Its main tasks:

• Subscribing to one or more topics to read messages.
• Receiving messages in the order determined by Kafka (usually by partitions).
• Processing the received data — for example, writing to a database, calling business logic.
• Managing offsets to know which messages have already been processed and ensure reliability.

The consumer allows scaling data processing by running multiple instances that collectively read from the topic partitions.

Example: if you have a stream of order events, the consumer will read these events and update the order status in your system.