In Apache Kafka, consumer group strategy is crucial for efficient data processing and balancing workloads across partitions. To avoid hotspots and ensure parallelism, it's essential to consider the number of consumers in relation to the number of partitions, as each partition is assigned one thread per consumer. A single consumer group can lead to unavailability in case of unclean failure, whereas having multiple groups with separate configurations can improve scalability and fault tolerance. Proper configuration of consumer group IDs is vital for detecting new data, work sharing, and data recovery. The optimal approach depends on the specific use case, and careful consideration must be taken into account when designing a large piece of architecture.