Free Confluent CCAAK Practice Exam with Questions & Answers | Set: 2

Partitions are Kafka’s core mechanism for scaling and distributing load. Each partition of a topic is distributed across brokers. Producers and consumers interact with specific partitions, and Kafka automatically balances those partitions across available brokers.

From Kafka documentation:

“Partitions allow Kafka to parallelize data and distribute load across brokers and clients.”

A → Correct: Distributes data and load

B → Incorrect: Replicas are for fault tolerance, not load balancing

C → Incorrect: Offsets track read progress, not distribute load

D → Incorrect: Connectors are part of Kafka Connect, not used for client balancing

Page Reference:

Kafka: The Definitive Guide, 1st Edition, Chapter 4, p. 132–134

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Confluent Schema Registry supports the following schema types for use with Kafka:

Avro

Protobuf

JSON Schema

These schemas are officially supported for subject versioning, compatibility checks, and REST interface integration.

From Confluent documentation:

“The Confluent Schema Registry supports Avro, JSON Schema, and Protobuf formats.”

Incorrect Options:

gRPC is not supported as a schema format.

Thrift is not supported in Schema Registry.

Page Reference:

Confluent Kafka: The Definitive Guide, 1st Edition, Chapter 7, p. 208–210

Confluent Schema Registry Documentation: Overview Section (Schema Types)

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The Kafka REST Proxy, provided as part of Confluent Platform, allows clients to interact with Kafka over REST APIs. When securing communication between REST Proxy and REST clients, it uses TLS (HTTPS).

As per the official Confluent documentation for REST Proxy security:

“The REST Proxy supports HTTPS to encrypt communication between REST clients and the REST Proxy.”

TLS/SSL encryption ensures that data in transit is secure and private.

Other options listed, such as MD5 (a hashing algorithm), SCRAM (an authentication mechanism), and Kerberos (an authentication protocol), do not provide direct encryption of the communication channel itself for REST Proxy. They can be part of broader security configurations (e.g., SCRAM for Kafka brokers, Kerberos for SASL authentication), butTLS (HTTPS)is the explicit mechanism for encrypting data between the REST Proxy and its clients.

Page Reference:

Confluent Kafka: The Definitive Guide, 1st Edition, Chapter 9 (“Kafka Security”), Section “REST Proxy Security” (p. 288–289).

Confluent Platform REST Proxy Documentation, “Encryption (HTTPS)”.

In Kafka, a partition is a fundamental unit of parallelism and storage. Each topic in Kafka consists of one or more partitions, which are ordered, immutable sequences of records. Importantly, partitions themselves are broken down into segments on the disk. According to the official Kafka documentation:

“A partition is made up of one or more segment files on disk. Each segment is a continuous sequence of messages and each segment file is named after the offset of the first message it contains.”(Apache Kafka Documentation, "Log Basics" section).

Each partition resides in its own directory under the log.dirs configuration on the broker. The documentation states:“The log for each topic partition is stored in its own directory under the log.dirs configuration.”

Given these official clarifications:

Option A is incorrectbecause a partition is not represented by a single segment; rather, it can have multiple segments (as log segments are created to manage file sizes and facilitate compaction or deletion).

Option B is correctas it accurately states that a partition consists of multiple segments.

Option C is correctas all segments for a partition reside in a single directory.

Option D is incorrectbecause partition size is determined by the sum of all its segments, not just the largest one.

Apache Kafka's built-in ACL mechanism (SimpleAclAuthorizer) stores ACL data in ZooKeeper. ACLs are propagated to brokers from ZooKeeper and cached in memory for fast lookup.

From Kafka documentation:

“ACLs are stored in ZooKeeper under /kafka-acl and are loaded into each broker at startup and on updates.”

B → Correct: ZooKeeper stores ACLs centrally.

A → Brokers load ACLs but don’t persist them.

C & D → Do not store or manage ACLs.

Page Reference:

Kafka: The Definitive Guide, 1st Edition, Chapter 9, p. 285

Apache Kafka Documentation: Authorizer Configuration

Kafka consumers in a consumer group consume partitions exclusively. With 4 partitions and only 2 consumers, each consumer is processing 2 partitions. To increase parallelism, more consumers can be added to the group (up to 4) so that each consumer handles fewer partitions, which reduces the lag.

From Kafka documentation:

“Increasing the number of consumers in a group increases parallelism and helps reduce lag, assuming there are enough partitions.”

A → Ineffective unless followed by rebalancing and consumer scaling.

B → Would create a separate group and not share load.

C → Not applicable; consumers don’t acknowledge messages like producers.

Page Reference:

Kafka: The Definitive Guide, 1st Edition, Chapter 4, p. 127–129

Apache Kafka Documentation: Consumer Group Behavior

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