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Apache Kafka Interview Questions

Topics, partitions, consumer groups, delivery semantics, log compaction, Kafka Streams, Connect, and Schema Registry.

Topics & PartitionsConsumersDelivery SemanticsKafka StreamsOperationsAria-powered explanations
0 / 100 answered
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8 Easy44 Medium48 Hard

Showing 1–20 of 100

#1What is Apache Kafka and what problems does it solve?

Easy
Fundamentals

#2What are topics, partitions, and offsets in Kafka?

Easy
Fundamentals

#3What is a consumer group and how does it enable parallelism?

Medium
Consumers

#4Explain Kafka delivery semantics: at-most-once, at-least-once, and exactly-once.

Hard
Reliability

#5How does Kafka ensure message ordering?

Medium
Fundamentals

#6What are producer acknowledgment settings (acks)?

Medium
Producers

#7What is log compaction in Kafka?

Hard
Internals

#8What is Kafka Streams and when would you use it?

Hard
Stream Processing

#9What is consumer lag and how do you monitor it?

Medium
Operations

#10How does Kafka differ from RabbitMQ?

Medium
Comparisons

#11What is the role of ZooKeeper / KRaft in Kafka?

Medium
Internals

#12How do you handle large messages in Kafka?

Hard
Producers

#13What is Kafka Connect?

Medium
Ecosystem

#14How does Kafka replication work?

Hard
Reliability

#15What is Schema Registry and why is it important?

Hard
Ecosystem

#16What is a Kafka topic and how is it structured?

Easy
Fundamentals

#17What is the difference between Kafka and RabbitMQ?

Medium
Fundamentals

#18How do you handle consumer group rebalancing?

Hard
Consumer

#19What is Kafka Streams?

Hard
Ecosystem

#20What are Kafka transactions and how do they work?

Hard
Reliability

Showing 1–20 of 100

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All 100 Apache Kafka questions at a glance
  1. What is Apache Kafka and what problems does it solve?(Easy)
  2. What are topics, partitions, and offsets in Kafka?(Easy)
  3. What is a consumer group and how does it enable parallelism?(Medium)
  4. Explain Kafka delivery semantics: at-most-once, at-least-once, and exactly-once.(Hard)
  5. How does Kafka ensure message ordering?(Medium)
  6. What are producer acknowledgment settings (acks)?(Medium)
  7. What is log compaction in Kafka?(Hard)
  8. What is Kafka Streams and when would you use it?(Hard)
  9. What is consumer lag and how do you monitor it?(Medium)
  10. How does Kafka differ from RabbitMQ?(Medium)
  11. What is the role of ZooKeeper / KRaft in Kafka?(Medium)
  12. How do you handle large messages in Kafka?(Hard)
  13. What is Kafka Connect?(Medium)
  14. How does Kafka replication work?(Hard)
  15. What is Schema Registry and why is it important?(Hard)
  16. What is a Kafka topic and how is it structured?(Easy)
  17. What is the difference between Kafka and RabbitMQ?(Medium)
  18. How do you handle consumer group rebalancing?(Hard)
  19. What is Kafka Streams?(Hard)
  20. What are Kafka transactions and how do they work?(Hard)
  21. What is the difference between at-most-once, at-least-once, and exactly-once delivery?(Hard)
  22. How do you choose the right number of partitions for a Kafka topic?(Hard)
  23. What is KRaft mode in Kafka?(Medium)
  24. What is log compaction in Kafka?(Hard)
  25. How does Kafka handle backpressure?(Medium)
  26. What is the role of the Kafka controller?(Hard)
  27. What is the difference between Kafka producer acks=0, acks=1, and acks=all?(Medium)
  28. How do you monitor Kafka in production?(Medium)
  29. What is a Kafka consumer poll loop?(Medium)
  30. What are Kafka headers and how are they used?(Medium)
  31. What is the consumer group coordinator?(Hard)
  32. How do you implement idempotent consumers with Kafka?(Hard)
  33. What is Kafka's storage architecture?(Hard)
  34. What is consumer lag and how do you manage it?(Medium)
  35. What is the Kafka retention policy and how does it work?(Medium)
  36. How do you handle poison pill messages in Kafka?(Medium)
  37. What is Kafka MirrorMaker 2 and when do you use it?(Hard)
  38. How does Kafka achieve high throughput?(Hard)
  39. What is Kafka's ISR (In-Sync Replicas) and how does it affect durability?(Hard)
  40. What are Kafka Streams stateful operations?(Hard)
  41. What is the difference between Kafka Streams and Apache Flink?(Hard)
  42. How does Kafka handle message ordering?(Medium)
  43. What is Kafka's __consumer_offsets topic?(Hard)
  44. How do you implement a CDC pipeline with Kafka and Debezium?(Hard)
  45. What is the difference between push and pull in Kafka?(Medium)
  46. How do you perform a Kafka cluster rolling restart?(Hard)
  47. What is Kafka consumer group offset management?(Medium)
  48. What is Kafka's batch processing capability?(Medium)
  49. What is the relationship between Kafka partitions and consumers?(Medium)
  50. What is the Kafka producer buffer and how does it affect performance?(Medium)
  51. How does Kafka support exactly-once semantics end to end?(Hard)
  52. What is Kafka's message format / record format?(Hard)
  53. How does Kafka handle broker failure and partition recovery?(Hard)
  54. What is Kafka's wire protocol?(Hard)
  55. What are Kafka consumer interceptors?(Medium)
  56. How do you secure a Kafka cluster?(Hard)
  57. What is Kafka's log segment management?(Medium)
  58. How do you increase the throughput of a Kafka producer?(Medium)
  59. What is the Kafka AdminClient API?(Medium)
  60. What is tiered storage in Kafka?(Hard)
  61. How does Kafka handle time and event-time processing?(Hard)
  62. What is the difference between Kafka consumer auto.offset.reset=earliest vs latest?(Easy)
  63. What is Kafka's producer idempotence?(Hard)
  64. What are the different Kafka message delivery patterns?(Medium)
  65. How do you tune Kafka for low latency?(Hard)
  66. What is Kafka's producer partitioner?(Medium)
  67. What is the Kafka Broker Rack Awareness?(Medium)
  68. How do you handle schema migrations in a Kafka event stream?(Hard)
  69. What are Kafka quotas and how do they work?(Medium)
  70. What is a Kafka topic compaction tombstone?(Medium)
  71. How do you implement a Kafka consumer with Spring Boot?(Medium)
  72. What is the Kafka offset commit semantics?(Hard)
  73. What is Kafka topic naming convention?(Easy)
  74. How do you benchmark a Kafka cluster?(Medium)
  75. What is the difference between Kafka and Apache Pulsar?(Hard)
  76. How do you implement a Kafka producer with Spring Boot?(Medium)
  77. What is a Kafka connector and how does it work?(Medium)
  78. What is the Kafka consumer fetch protocol?(Hard)
  79. What is Kafka consumer group rebalance protocol and incremental cooperative rebalancing?(Hard)
  80. What is the Kafka log cleaner and how does compaction work internally?(Hard)
  81. How do you debug Kafka consumer issues?(Medium)
  82. What is Kafka's min.insync.replicas and how does it interact with acks?(Hard)
  83. What is Apache Kafka's role in the data lakehouse architecture?(Hard)
  84. What is the Kafka log flush policy and how does it affect durability?(Hard)
  85. How do you implement a Saga with Kafka?(Hard)
  86. What is the difference between Kafka topic partitions and consumer group partitions?(Medium)
  87. What is Confluent's ksqlDB?(Medium)
  88. What is Kafka's message size limit and how do you handle large messages?(Medium)
  89. What are Kafka producer callbacks and how are they used?(Medium)
  90. What is the difference between Kafka topic replication and consumer group replication?(Easy)
  91. How do you implement a Kafka multi-datacenter setup?(Hard)
  92. What is Kafka's leader epoch?(Hard)
  93. What is Kafka's group.id and how does it affect consumption?(Easy)
  94. What is the high watermark in Kafka?(Hard)
  95. How do you set up Kafka for development with Docker?(Easy)
  96. What is a Kafka consumer group's session timeout vs heartbeat interval?(Medium)
  97. What is a Kafka changelog topic in Kafka Streams?(Hard)
  98. What happens when a Kafka broker runs out of disk space?(Hard)
  99. What is Kafka's dynamic configuration and how do you update it?(Medium)
  100. What is the Kafka consumer seek API?(Medium)