Organizing Kafka Consumers in Akka Cluster

Hey guys,

I would like to know your opinion for the following situation:

An application is based Kafka. There are a small number of topics but in case of high load a high number of consumers.
In that case, it makes sense to put each consumer in a independent service.

For co-locating Kafka partitions and shards akka-stream-kafka-cluster-sharding is used.
Does it makes sense to create for each consumer (per topic) a akka cluster then or would you create only one?

Best
Sigurd