title: If you have less consumers than partitions, what happens?
body: <p>If you have less consumers than partitions, does that simply mean you will not consume all the messages on a given topic?</p>
  
  <p>In a cloud environment, how are you suppose to keep track how many consumers are running and how many are pointing to a given topic#partition?</p>
  
  <p>What if you have multiple consumers on a given topic#partition?  I guess the consumer has to somehow keep track of what messages it has already processed in case of duplicates?</p>