Can multiple consumers from the same consumer group read the same partition simultaneously?

No, multiple consumers from the same consumer group cannot read the same partition simultaneously. In Kafka and similar systems, each partition can only be assigned to one consumer within a consumer group. This ensures sequential message processing and prevents duplication.

If there are more consumers in the group than partitions, some consumers will be idle, as partitions cannot be shared among multiple consumers at the same time.

Thus, parallelism is achieved by increasing the number of partitions, not by multiple consumers reading the same partition simultaneously.