I believe the default of kafka is if you do not specify a consumer group it makes up a random one for you. It is an optional field. Not sure 'why of it'. If

I believe the default of kafka is if you do not specify a consumer group it makes up a random one for you. It is an optional field. Not sure 'why of it'. If it were me doing that sort of behavior I would think the idea was short lived processes that do a small amount of work then disappear. For that idea, consumer group would not make sense as you would just want to start at the front or end of the topic and blast thru it anyway. Once you add the idea of two different things happening or gangs of processes working from the same events with partitions then consumer groups makes a lot more sense to add in. But retro fitting it back in would be awful? So default is 'random' groupid? Probably in the pip's somewhere what the rational is.