Apache Kafka Kafka Topics & Partitions

Question 1

What is the purpose of the replication factor in a Kafka topic?

Accepted Answer

It defines how many copies of each partition exist across brokers for fault tolerance

Answer

The replication factor specifies how many broker copies exist for each partition, ensuring data durability if a broker fails.

Question 2

Which Kafka CLI tool is used to create a new topic?

Accepted Answer

kafka-topics.sh

Answer

kafka-topics.sh with the --create flag is the standard tool for creating new Kafka topics from the command line.

Question 3

What determines which partition a keyed message is written to?

Accepted Answer

hash(key) % number_of_partitions

Answer

By default, Kafka uses the murmur2 hash of the key modulo the number of partitions to determine the target partition for a keyed message.

Question 4

What is the minimum in-sync replicas (min.insync.replicas) setting used for?

Accepted Answer

Defines the minimum number of replicas that must acknowledge a write when acks=all

Answer

min.insync.replicas specifies how many replicas must be in-sync for a produce request with acks=all to succeed, preventing data loss.

Question 5

Can you decrease the number of partitions in an existing Kafka topic?

Accepted Answer

No, partition count can only be increased, never decreased

Answer

Kafka does not support decreasing the partition count of an existing topic because it would require redistributing data and break ordering guarantees.

Apache Kafka Practice Test

Apache Kafka Practice Test

Apache Kafka Kafka Topics & Partitions