title: Kafka - is it possible to alter Topic's partition count while keeping the change transparent to Producers and Consumers?
body: <p>I am investigating on Kafka to assess its suitability for our use case. Can you please help me understand how flexible is Kafka with changing the number of partitions for an existing Topic? </p>
  
  <p>Specifically, </p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Is it possible to change the number of partitions without tearing down the cluster? </li>
  <li>And is it possible to do that without bringing down the topic? </li>
  <li>Will adding/removing partitions automatically take care of redistributing messages across the new partitions?</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Ideally, I would want the change to be transparent to the producers and consumers. Does Kafka ensure this?</p>
  
  <p><strong>Update:</strong>
  From my understanding so far, it looks like Kafka's design cannot allow this because it mapping of consumer groups to partitions will have to be altered. Is that correct?</p>