Top interview questions and answers related to Kafka

Hello everyone, and welcome to today's blog post on Kafka! In this post, we will be going over the top 50 interview questions and answers related to Kafka. Whether you are an experienced Kafka developer or just starting out, this post will help you prepare for your next Kafka interview.

Let's get started!

What is Kafka?

Kafka is an open-source distributed streaming platform used for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications.

What are the key components of Kafka?

The key components of Kafka are producers, consumers, brokers, topics, and partitions.

What is a Kafka broker?

A Kafka broker is a server that handles the storage and retrieval of messages from Kafka topics.

What is a Kafka topic?

A Kafka topic is a category or feed name to which messages are published.

What is a Kafka partition?

A Kafka partition is a unit of parallelism in Kafka. It allows for the distribution of messages across multiple brokers.

What is a Kafka producer?

A Kafka producer is a client application that publishes messages to Kafka topics.

What is a Kafka consumer?

A Kafka consumer is a client application that reads messages from Kafka topics.

What is a Kafka cluster?

A Kafka cluster is a group of brokers that work together to handle the storage and retrieval of messages.

What is the role of Zookeeper in Kafka?

Zookeeper is used in Kafka for coordination between brokers, producers, and consumers.

What are the benefits of using Kafka?

Kafka offers high throughput, fault-tolerance, and scalability for real-time data streaming.

How is Kafka different from traditional messaging systems?

Kafka provides a distributed architecture, which allows for better scalability and fault tolerance compared to traditional messaging systems.

What is the default port number for Kafka?

The default port number for Kafka is 9092.

What is a Kafka message?

A Kafka message is a unit of data that is published to a Kafka topic.

How does Kafka ensure fault-tolerance?

Kafka ensures fault-tolerance by replicating messages across multiple brokers.

How does Kafka guarantee message ordering?

Kafka guarantees message ordering within a partition.

How does Kafka handle message retention?

Kafka allows for the configuration of message retention based on time or size.

What is a Kafka consumer group?

A Kafka consumer group is a set of consumers that work together to consume messages from Kafka topics.

How does Kafka handle load balancing?

Kafka handles load balancing by distributing partitions across available consumer instances in a consumer group.

What is a Kafka connector?

A Kafka connector is a tool used for importing and exporting data from external systems into Kafka.

What is the role of Apache Avro in Kafka?

Apache Avro is used in Kafka for serialization and deserialization of messages.

What is the role of Apache Kafka Streams?

Apache Kafka Streams is a library used for building stream processing applications on top of Kafka.

What is the role of Apache Kafka Connect?

Apache Kafka Connect is a tool used for building and managing Kafka connectors.

What is the role of Schema Registry in Kafka?

Schema Registry is used in Kafka for storing and managing Avro schemas.

What is a Kafka Streams application?

A Kafka Streams application is a stream processing application built using the Kafka Streams library.

What is the difference between Kafka Streams and Kafka Connect?

Kafka Streams is used for building stream processing applications, while Kafka Connect is used for importing and exporting data from external systems into Kafka.

What is the role of a Kafka offset?

A Kafka offset is a unique identifier assigned to each message within a partition.

What is a Kafka API?

Kafka provides several APIs for producers, consumers, and streams.