CCDAK Confluent Certified Developer for Apache Kafka Certification Examination Questions and Answers

For real-time applications, the key metric to monitor is consumer lag — the difference between the latest offset on the broker and the last committed offset by the consumer.

From Kafka 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.

If a message key is not provided, Kafka’s default partitioner uses round-robin distribution across available partitions.

From Kafka Producer Design:

“If no key is provided, the default partitioner distributes messages round-robin to available partitions.”

A is incorrect — not all go to partition 0.

C is invalid — Kafka doesn’t group messages into one segment without a key.

D is false — ordering is not preserved across partitions without a key.

With acks=all, the leader waits for min.insync.replicas to acknowledge the message. Since min.insync.replicas=3, Kafka will only commit the message once 3 brokers (leader + 2 followers) confirm they have the message.

From Kafka Documentation > Acks and Durability:

“If acks=all is specified, the producer will wait until the full set of in-sync replicas has acknowledged the record. The minimum number of in-sync replicas is controlled by min.insync.replicas.”

Even though the replication factor is 4, only 3 acknowledgments are needed, as defined by min.insync.replicas.

For proper delivery handling with acks=all:

Use callback to log or act on success/failure.

Use try/catch to handle synchronous exceptions like serialization errors or network failures.

From Kafka 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().

A 409 Conflict response in Kafka Connect REST API usually means:

The connector name provided already exists (i.e., a connector with that name is already deployed).

The Kafka Connect cluster is temporarily unavailable to accept new tasks due to a rebalance in progress.

From the Confluent Developer documentation and Kafka Connect REST API spec:

“409 – Conflict. The connector name is already in use or the worker group is in the process of rebalancing and cannot complete the request at this time.”

Option A is incorrect because invalid configurations return 400 Bad Request, not 409.

Option B is invalid because Kafka Connect does not have a strict concept of "capacity" that prevents connector creation with a 409.

According to the official Apache Kafka producer metrics documentation, the I/O thread ratio and I/O thread wait ratio indicate how busy the producer’s network I/O thread is and how much time it spends waiting. When both metrics are low, it means the I/O thread is underutilized and not blocked on network operations.

This strongly suggests that the bottleneck is not network-related. If there were network latency or a bad data link (Option B), the I/O thread wait ratio would be high. Similarly, large batches (Option A) or compression (Option D) generally increase throughput and would result in higher I/O utilization.

An expensive or blocking callback function (for example, heavy logic in onCompletion()) executes in the producer’s sender thread context. Kafka documentation explicitly warns that slow callbacks can throttle producer throughput because they delay the processing of acknowledgements and subsequent sends.

Therefore, the most likely and documented cause of low producer throughput with low I/O utilization is expensive callback logic in the producer code.

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With acks=all and min.insync.replicas=2, Kafka requires at least two in-sync replicas to acknowledge a write. If only one broker is alive, the condition fails, and NotEnoughReplicasException is thrown by the producer.

From Kafka Producer Exception Docs:

“NotEnoughReplicasException is thrown when the number of in-sync replicas is insufficient to satisfy acks=all with min.insync.replicas.”

NetworkException is generic and not raised here.

NotCoordinatorException is related to consumer group coordination.

NotLeaderForPartitionException is unrelated unless accessing an unassigned leader.

Kafka Connect sink connectors use the standard Kafka consumer mechanism to track offsets, which means offsets are stored in the __consumer_offsets internal topic.

From Kafka Connect Documentation:

“Sink connectors are regular Kafka consumers and store their offsets in the __consumer_offsets topic like any other consumer.”

The other options refer to source connectors or worker configuration.

offsets.storage.topic is relevant for source connectors.

The Apache Kafka documentation states that consumer offsets are stored per consumer group and must be explicitly reset if an application needs to reprocess data from an earlier position. The officially supported and safest way to reset offsets for an existing consumer group is by using the kafka-consumer-groups CLI tool with the --reset-offsets option and the --to-earliest flag.

Setting auto.offset.reset=earliest (Option D) only applies when no committed offset exists for a partition. Since this consumer is already running in production, offsets are already committed, making this option ineffective. Option C does not change offsets because Kafka identifies consumers by group ID, not application instance. Option B is extremely dangerous and incorrect, as setting retention.ms=0 deletes data for all consumers and impacts other applications.

Therefore, using the CLI to reset offsets for the specific consumer group ensures controlled, auditable, and targeted offset management without affecting other consumers or the topic itself. This approach is explicitly documented in Kafka’s consumer group administration tools.

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The Apache Kafka documentation explains that Kafka’s parallelism model is based on topic partitions and consumer groups. Within a single consumer group, each partition can be assigned to at most one consumer at a time. As a result, the maximum level of parallelism for a consumer group is equal to the number of partitions in the topic.

In this scenario, the topic has five partitions, which means that up to five consumers in the same consumer group can actively consume data in parallel. If more than five consumers are added, the extra consumers will remain idle because there are no additional partitions to assign.

Option B is incorrect because Kafka does not enforce equal message consumption across partitions; message distribution depends on producers and partitioning strategy. Option C is false because partitions may be hosted on different brokers, and consumers fetch data from multiple brokers. Option D is incorrect because a single partition cannot be consumed by multiple consumers within the same group simultaneously.

Therefore, the only valid assumption is that a maximum of five consumers can actively consume messages in the same consumer group.

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To change the replication factor of an existing topic, you must perform a partition reassignment, because the replication factor is not directly modifiable via kafka-topics.sh. The kafka-reassign-partitions.sh tool 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 is not an official Kafka tool.

Frequent rebalances in a consumer group occur when:

Consumers are too slow and miss heartbeats (A), or

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

From Kafka 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) affects load balancing, not rebalance frequency.

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

When using Kafka Connect with sink connectors (like S3 Sink), each task is assigned one or more topic partitions. The total number of partitions (6) is evenly distributed across the available tasks (2). Thus, each task will handle 3 partitions.

From Kafka Connect Documentation:

“Kafka Connect divides the topic partitions among available tasks. For example, a topic with six partitions and two tasks results in each task handling three partitions.”

The batch.size config sets the maximum number of bytes to batch per partition before sending. This allows Kafka producers to amortize I/O and improve throughput.

From Kafka Producer Configuration Docs:

“batch.size is the maximum amount of data per partition the producer will batch before sending.”

buffer.memory sets total memory for the producer, not per-batch.

send.buffer.bytes is a TCP socket buffer, not a Kafka config.

max.block.ms controls blocking time, not size.

RetriableException is a subclass of KafkaException, indicating transient issues that might succeed if retried. Examples include:

LeaderNotAvailableException: Happens when metadata is not yet propagated or leader election is in progress.

NotEnoughReplicasException: Happens when the number of in-sync replicas is insufficient. This can be transient if replicas come back online.

From the Apache Kafka Java Client documentation:

"These exceptions (like LeaderNotAvailableException, NotEnoughReplicasException) are transient and the client will retry them automatically depending on retry configuration."

RecordTooLargeException and AuthorizationException are non-retriable as they indicate client-side or permission errors.

unclean.leader.election.enable=false → Prevents data loss by only considering in-sync replicas when rebalancing.

replication.factor → Specifies how many redundant copies of partitions are distributed across brokers.

min.insync.replicas=2 → Sets the standard for the number of partition instances that must keep up with the latest committed message.

unclean.leader.election.enable=false ensures that only in-sync replicas can be elected as leaders. If disabled, an out-of-sync replica may become leader, potentially leading to data loss.

replication.factor defines how many brokers will maintain copies of each partition, directly impacting durability and availability.

min.insync.replicas determines how many replicas must acknowledge a write when acks=all is used, enforcing write durability.

According to the official Apache Kafka Connect and Confluent JDBC Source Connector documentation, the correct connector class for a JDBC source connector is io.confluent.connect.jdbc.JdbcSourceConnector. This connector is used to read data from relational databases and publish each table as a Kafka topic.

To read all rows from a specific table, the configuration must include table.whitelist (or table.include.list in newer versions) with the table name, and a topic.prefix to determine the Kafka topic name. In this case, using topic.prefix=dbl- with table.whitelist=orders results in records being written to the dbl-orders topic, which matches the requirement.

Options A, B, and C are invalid because they reference a non-existent connector class (DdbcSourceConnector), contain unsupported properties such as topic.whitelist for a source connector, or include malformed/incorrect JDBC parameters. Additionally, blacklisting tables does not ensure that only the orders table is read.

Therefore, option D is the only configuration that is syntactically correct, uses the proper connector class, and aligns with the official Kafka Connect JDBC Source Connector documentation.

The official Apache Kafka Connect documentation explains that connectors run within the same worker JVM, and all logs are written through the worker’s logging framework (Log4j or Log4j2). To isolate logs for a specific connector, Kafka Connect supports connector-specific logging contexts, which can be routed to separate log files using logging configuration.

By modifying the log4j.properties (or log4j2.xml) file to define a dedicated logger and appender for the connector’s package or class name, you can direct logs from that connector to a separate file. This is the recommended and documented approach for debugging individual connectors in a shared Connect cluster.

Option A is incorrect because there is no generic “enable connector context” switch. Option B may increase verbosity but does not isolate logs per connector. Option D is false; Kafka Connect explicitly supports connector-level log separation through logging configuration.

Therefore, the correct approach is to configure a dedicated log appender for the specific connector.

For SASL/PLAIN authentication over SSL, the correct combination is:

security.protocol=SASL_SSL

sasl.jaas.config=...PlainLoginModule required username=... password=...

From Kafka Security Documentation:

“For SASL/PLAIN over SSL, configure security.protocol=SASL_SSL and provide login module configuration using sasl.jaas.config.”

Options B and D are incorrect because they do not pair the correct protocol with the authentication method.

Apache Kafka Connect stores source connector offsets in a Kafka topic defined by the offset.storage.topic configuration. Since this property is explicitly set to connect-offsets, Kafka Connect will commit offsets to that topic, making Option C correct.

The offset.storage.replication.factor controls how many replicas the offsets topic will have. When this value is set to -1, Kafka Connect uses the broker’s default replication factor, as documented in the Kafka Connect worker configuration reference. Therefore, Option A is also correct.

Option B is incorrect because Kafka Connect does not use Kafka’s internal consumer offsets topic (__consumer_offsets). It always uses the configured offsets topic. Option D is incorrect because offset.flush.timeout.ms defines how long Connect will wait for offset commits to complete, not how long it waits before attempting a commit. The commit interval itself is controlled by offset.flush.interval.ms (60 seconds in this case).

Thus, the correct statements that match the expected behavior are A and C.

The ConsumerRebalanceListener lets you handle partition assignments and revocations during rebalances. This is critical for managing offsets, stateful processing, or external transactions.

From Kafka Consumer Rebalance Docs:

“Implementing ConsumerRebalanceListener allows your application to take action before and after partitions are reassigned.”

A is true: It lets your app react when partitions assigned to the consumer change.

B, C, and D are unrelated to consumer rebalancing directly.

According to the official Apache Kafka Streams documentation, session windows are specifically designed to model periods of activity separated by gaps of inactivity. A session window groups events that occur close together in time and closes when no new events arrive within a defined inactivity gap.

In this use case, tracking user shopping cart behavior requires detecting when a user becomes inactive (for example, stops adding or removing items). Session windows naturally represent this pattern by creating a new window when activity resumes after a period of silence. This makes them ideal for modeling user sessions, cart abandonment detection, and inactivity analysis.

Hopping and tumbling windows (Options B and C) are fixed-time windows and are not well-suited for detecting inactivity, as they segment data based on clock time rather than behavior. Sliding windows are primarily used for continuous joins and do not explicitly model inactivity gaps.

Therefore, session windows are the correct and officially recommended choice for identifying periods of user inactivity in Kafka Streams applications.

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Table → Product, Customers

Stream → Orders_Placed, Shipment_Of_Orders

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

Streams represent real-time event data — e.g., orders placed, shipments processed.

From Kafka Streams Documentation:

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

Low I/O thread activity with blocked throughput often indicates that producer callbacks are consuming too much time, causing the sender thread to block while waiting for onCompletion() to finish.

From Kafka Producer Performance Guide:

“Expensive logic in callbacks (e.g., I/O or complex computation) can block the sender thread, reducing throughput.”

Compression (A) may slightly impact CPU but not I/O thread usage.

Large batches (B) improve throughput if managed correctly.

A Layer 2 network issue (C) would lead to packet loss, not specifically low callback metrics.