I’ve had a business requirement to slow down the consumption rate of a kafka consumer due to the impact it could possibly cause to other microservices. After a bit of research I’ve come to a solution being: max-poll-records to limit the number of records being consumed from each poll and setting idleBetweenPolls to regulate the interval at which each poll should be executed. Being mindful to not exceed the time stipulated in max-poll-interval-ms.