Old thread ping! @msharpe did you ever get this working? But yes, I believe what you were proposing could/should work. Without knowing too much about Spring, if you wanted each thread to process only a single partition, then you’d have to do some “topic dispatch” when receiving a message off a queue… look at the topic it was published to and dispatch it to the appropriate thread. But you wouldn’t necessarily need 10 threads-per-instance unless you really needed/wanted that for performance… you could do it all with a single thread? You at least know that, for a given queue and its associated topic partition subscriptions, that order would be guaranteed for each of those partitions.
There’s a feature that’s in the planning stages called “partitioned queues” that would hopefully relieve some of this “manual” configuration around topic partitioning. Not sure when it’s coming though.