# Grouping

## General

KubeMQ supports grouping receivers with the same subscription channel patterns to form a load balancing group.

## Consumer Groups

The group pattern is a useful pattern for sharing message load handling between services and for redundancy functionality too.

During a Subscription request, the receiver can set the group name to join or not. Based on the Group value setting KubeMQ will deliver messages to the receiver as follows:

* Any receiver without a group setting (group="", blank)
* Only one receiver for each group he belongs to

![](https://2828835384-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-legacy-files/o/assets%2F-M2b9dwAGbMPWty0fPGr%2F-M2cg-nL53EVg5rPnOZB%2F-M2chJWqlu4TrXg-qcFP%2Fgrouping.png?alt=media\&token=4a09c7a6-948a-4085-8ad6-fb36aa677c15)

Example:

In the table below we have 8 receivers which subscribe to different channels and groups:

| Receiver Name | Channel   | Group |
| ------------- | --------- | ----- |
| R1            | `foo.>`   | `""`  |
| R2            | `foo.>`   | `g1`  |
| R3            | `foo.>`   | `g1`  |
| R4            | `foo.*`   | `g2`  |
| R5            | `foo.*`   | `g2`  |
| R6            | `>`       | `w1`  |
| R7            | `*`       | `""`  |
| R8            | `foo.bar` | `""`  |

In the table below, we explore several message channels and which receiver will get them:

| Sending Message to Channel | Receivers                      |
| -------------------------- | ------------------------------ |
| `foo`                      | R6,R7                          |
| `foo.bar`                  | R1, R2 or R3, R4 or R5, R6, R8 |
| `foo.bar.zoo`              | R1, R2 or R3, R6, R8           |