CCDAK Confluent Certified Developer for Apache Kafka Certification Examination Free Practice Exam Questions (2025 Updated)

For real-time applications, thekey metric to monitor is consumer lag— the difference between thelatest offset on the brokerand thelast committed offset by the consumer.

FromKafka Monitoring Guide:

“Consumer lag is the most important metric for real-time applications. It tells you how far behind the consumer is from the latest data in Kafka.”

B relates to replication, not client responsiveness.

C tracks group membership stability, not data delay.

D tracks input throughput, not processing latency.

For proper delivery handling with acks=all:

Usecallbackto log or act on success/failure.

Usetry/catchto handle synchronous exceptions like serialization errors or network failures.

FromKafka Producer Documentation:

“Errors can be caught either via the returned Future or via the callback interface. For fatal errors, use a try/catch block around the send call.”

Option B is incorrect because send() returns a Future, not RecordMetadata directly.

Option D is invalid — ProducerRecord has no method called status().

Frequentrebalancesin a consumer group occur when:

Consumers are too slowand miss heartbeats (A), or

Instances crash or restart, triggering group membership changes (D)

FromKafka Consumer Group Coordination Docs:

“If a consumer fails to send a heartbeat in time (due to slowness or crash), it is removed from the group, causing a rebalance.”

Option B (partition mismatch) affectsload balancing, not rebalance frequency.

Option C (broker storage) doesn't trigger consumer rebalances.

To change the replication factor of an existing topic, you must perform apartition reassignment, because the replication factor is not directly modifiable via kafka-topics.sh. Thekafka-reassign-partitions.shtool is the official command-line utility to handle partition reassignments, including changing the replication factor.

This tool allows you to generate a reassignment JSON specifying new replica assignments per partition and then apply it.

From official documentation:

“To change the replication factor, use the kafka-reassign-partitions tool to assign the partitions to more or fewer brokers.”

Neither kafka-topics.sh nor kafka-reassign-topics.sh exists for this purpose, and kafka-recreate-topic.sh isnotan official Kafka tool.

Increasing partitions increasesparallelism, but also means:

Consumers in a group may have to handlemore partitions, especially if the number of consumers is lower than the number of partitions.

This can result inincreased lag, especially under high load.

FromKafka Topic Management Docs:

“Increasing the number of partitions increases consumer work, and if consumers can’t keep up, lag can accumulate.”

A is false:existing data is not redistributed.

B is false:records with the same key always map to the same partitionbased on hash.

D is not directly impacted by the partition count.

Session windowsare ideal for trackingperiods of activity separated by inactivity, such as user sessions.

FromKafka Streams Documentation > Windowing:

“A session window captures streams of events that areintermittentand separated by agap of inactivity.”

Tumbling/Hopping/Sliding windows are fixed in size

Session windows are dynamic and close after inactivity timeout

This makes them perfect for identifyinggaps in user interaction.

Kafka Connect can run instandalone modeordistributed mode. For simple tasks likereading logs from a file on a single host,standalone modeis recommended.

FromKafka Connect User Guide:

“Standalone mode is useful when running connectors on a single machine (e.g., for development or simple deployments like log collection from a local file).”

Distributed mode is preferred for scalability and fault tolerance but overkill for this use case.

To maintainmessage ordering per bank account, themessage key must be the account number. Kafka guaranteesordering per partition, and the partition is selected based on thehash of the key.

FromKafka Producer Docs:

“All records with the same key will be sent to the same partition, and Kafka preserves the order of records in a partition.”

Using account number ensures:

All messages for the same account go to the same partition

Order is maintained

Workload is evenly distributed if account keys are varied

Other options break ordering or introduce unnecessary randomness.

Log compactionensures that Kafka retains at least thelatest value per keyin a topic. Compaction happensin the backgroundand removes older records with the same keyin inactive log segments, not immediately.

From theKafka Documentation > Log Compaction:

“Kafka guarantees that thelast message for each keywill be retained in the log after compaction, even if earlier messages with the same key are deleted.”

So, D is correct. A is incorrect because compaction does not overwrite; it's a background process. B is incorrect—deletion is not immediate. C incorrectly suggests client-side hashmap behavior.

The bootstrap.servers setting is used by clients (producers and consumers) toinitially connectto the Kafka cluster. It does not need to list all brokers—just a few that are up and reachable. The client will then use the cluster metadata to discover the full broker list.

FromKafka Java Client Configuration Docs:

“This is a list of host/port pairs to use for establishing the initial connection to the Kafka cluster. The client will make use of all servers irrespective of which servers are specified here for bootstrapping.”

Hence,listing multiple brokers provides redundancyand fault tolerance in the event one is down during client startup.

Kafka clients useSLF4Jas a logging facade. To redirect Kafka logs tolog4j2, you must include theSLF4J binding for log4j2in your classpath:

“org.apache.logging.log4j:log4j-slf4j-impl bridges SLF4J to Log4j2 so that Kafka's logs integrate into your application's Log4j2 configuration.”

Option A is forLog4j 1.x, which is outdated.

Option C is incorrect; Kafka clients don't include logging bindings.

Option D is insufficient without the SLF4J bridge.

1st:Place the connector's JAR file in the directory specified by plugin.path

2nd:Restart the Kafka Connect cluster

3rd:Verify using REST API (/connector-plugins)

4th:Configure the connector

5th:(Repeat of 4th, duplicate step)

1st → Place the connector’s JAR file in the directory specified by the plugin.path configuration.

2nd → Restart the Kafka Connect cluster.

3rd → Verify that the connector is installed by listing all available connectors using the Kafka Connect REST API (/connector-plugins).

4th → Configure the connector using a JSON or properties file with the necessary settings.

5th → Configure the connector using a JSON or properties file with the necessary settings.

Kafka Connect requires that custom connectors be placed in the directory defined by plugin.path. After restarting the cluster, you can use the REST API to confirm availability and then deploy the connector configuration.

FromKafka Connect Documentation:

“After placing the JAR in the plugin.path, you must restart the Connect cluster to pick it up. Use the /connector-plugins REST endpoint to verify.”

The duplication of configuration is an error in the question options and should occur only once.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

✅C. Consumers can consume both committed and uncommitted transactions.By default,Kafka consumers only read committed messagesif they are configured with isolation.level=read_committed. However, if configured as read_uncommitted, theycan also consume uncommitted (potentially aborted) transactional messages.

From Kafka Documentation:

"The isolation.level setting controls whether the consumer will read only committed messages or all messages, including uncommitted messages from ongoing or aborted transactions."

✅D. Information about producers and their transactions is stored in the _transaction_state topic.Kafka uses an internal topic named__transaction_stateto maintain metadata about producer transactions. This topic is essential for tracking thetransaction lifecycle, fencing, and recovery.

From Kafka Internals:

“Kafka stores the state of active and completed transactions in an internal topic called __transaction_state.”

Kafka Streams usestransactional producersto guaranteeexactly-once semantics (EOS). This ensures that both theoutput recordsandstate store updatesare committed atomically, avoiding duplication or partial writes.

FromKafka Streams Documentation > Processing Guarantees:

“Kafka Streams leveragesKafka’s transactional APIsto commit the output records and internal state updatesas a single atomic unit, thereby providing exactly-once semantics.”

Option A is incorrect because log compaction is not disabled for EOS.

Option C incorrectly describes a checkpointing system Kafka Streams does not use.

Option D refers to deduplication, which is not how EOS is achieved in Streams.

Table→ Product, Customers

Stream→ Orders_Placed, Shipment_Of_Orders

Tablesrepresent slowly changing,reference data— e.g., customer profiles, product info.

Streamsrepresentreal-time event data— e.g., orders placed, shipments processed.

FromKafka Streams Documentation:

“Use KTable for reference datasets, and KStream for event-based processing such as orders or logs.”

If a key isnot specified, thedefault Kafka partitioner uses round-robinlogic to assign partitions. This leads toeven distributionof messages across all partitions.

FromKafka Producer Design:

“If the key is null, the producer will assign the partition in a round-robin fashion to achieve load balancing.”

There isno error, and partition 0 isnot alwayschosen in this case.

TheKafka Streams DSLprovides three primary abstractions:

KStream: Represents an unbounded stream of records (append-only).

KTable: Represents a changelog stream where each key has the latest value (like a materialized view).

GlobalKTable: A fully replicated version of KTable across all stream instances, enabling global joins.

FromKafka Streams Developer Guide:

“Kafka Streams provides three core abstractions: KStream, KTable, and GlobalKTable, each serving different purposes in stream processing and joins.”

GlobalKStream and StreamTable donot existin Kafka’s API.