Multiple Pod Replicas Connecting to the same Kafka Topic and Group?

Caveat: I don’t have too much experience with Kafka, so better to double check what I’m about to say.

My understanding is that Kafka is specifically designed for this particular scenario. Multiple clients can add messages and multiple clients can consume them.

I think these points in the documentation are pretty helpful:

https://kafka.apache.org/uses#uses_messaging

I also found the following quote here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/hdinsight/kafka/apache-kafka-producer-consumer-api

If you create multiple consumer instances using the same group ID, they’ll load balance reading from the topic.

Still, even if the system you’re using supports your requirements, you might be accidentally misconfiguring it or something like that. So I highly recommend testing your code as much as possible.