Q:

Is there a limitation on the number of consumer to the same topic in Kafka?

Does Kafka have a limitation on the simultaneous connections (created with
Consumer.createJavaConsumerConnector) for the same topic within the same
group?
My scenario is I need to consume a topic from different process (not
thread), so I need to create lots of high level consumers.

A:

The number of active consumers within the same consumer group is limited by the number of partitions of the topic. Extra consumers will act as backups and will only start consuming when one of the active consumers goes down and the group is re-balanced.
If you need to consume the same copy of the data within multiple processes, your consumers should be in different consumer groups. There is no limitation on the number of consumer groups you can have.

