How many partitions should you choose for a stream expected to need 8 parallel consumers at peak?

1. A 1
2. ✓ B At least 8, allowing headroom for future growth (correct answer)
3. C 4
4. D It does not matter

Shortcut: Partition count caps consumer parallelism and generally cannot be reduced. Provisioning at or above the expected peak concurrency avoids a costly migration later.