108 real Kafka questions from the Big Data bank, as asked in Indian campus drives and tech interviews. Every question has a verified answer and an AI-tutor explanation on placd — free to start.
1. What is Kafka partition?
Junior
A.a copy of a partition stored on another broker; one is the leader and the others follow for fault tolerance
B.a Kafka producer that assigns sequence numbers so retries do not create duplicate records on a partition
C.the position of a record within a partition
D.the unit of parallelism and ordering within a topic
A.Kafka partition — the default Kafka producer partitioner for null-key records that fills one partition per batch before switching, improving batching and throughput over round-robin
B.Kafka partition — the Kafka topic config setting how long messages are kept before deletion regardless of consumption, independent of any consumer offsets
C.Kafka partition — a set of consumers where each partition is read by exactly one member
D.Kafka partition — the unit of parallelism and ordering within a topic
A.Kafka consumer group — a Kafka producer that assigns sequence numbers so retries do not create duplicate records on a partition
B.Kafka consumer group — a set of consumers where each partition is read by exactly one member
C.Kafka consumer group — achieved via idempotent producer + transactions + read_committed
D.Kafka consumer group — the framework of reusable source and sink connectors that streams data between Kafka and external systems without custom producer or consumer code
A.reassigning partitions when a consumer joins or leaves the group
B.retention that keeps only the latest value per key
C.a Kafka producer that writes to multiple partitions atomically using a transactional ID so consumers see all or none
D.the default Kafka producer partitioner for null-key records that fills one partition per batch before switching, improving batching and throughput over round-robin
A.acks=all — the producer setting requiring all in-sync replicas to acknowledge a write
B.acks=all — the framework of reusable source and sink connectors that streams data between Kafka and external systems without custom producer or consumer code
C.acks=all — the Schema Registry setting (BACKWARD, FORWARD, FULL) governing which schema changes are allowed for a subject before registration is rejected
D.acks=all — a service storing versioned Avro, Protobuf, or JSON schemas and enforcing compatibility so producers and consumers evolve message formats safely
D.Kafka exactly-once — the Schema Registry setting (BACKWARD, FORWARD, FULL) governing which schema changes are allowed for a subject before registration is rejected
A.retention that keeps only the latest value per key
B.a Kafka feature that spreads partition replicas across racks or availability zones to survive zone failures
C.the Kafka Connect-based replication tool that copies topics, configs, and consumer offsets across clusters with offset translation for disaster recovery and migration
D.the unit of parallelism and ordering within a topic
A.log compaction — a class implementing Kafka's Partitioner interface to control which partition a record lands in beyond the default key-hash or sticky behavior
B.log compaction — retention that keeps only the latest value per key
C.log compaction — a Kafka feature that spreads partition replicas across racks or availability zones to survive zone failures
D.log compaction — a Kafka broker limit (bytes per second) applied per client or user to throttle producers and protect the cluster from being overwhelmed
A.Kafka offset — the unit of parallelism and ordering within a topic
B.Kafka offset — a Kafka retention policy that keeps only the latest record per key, useful for changelog and state topics
C.Kafka offset — a lightweight per-record transformation applied inside Kafka Connect to mask, route, or reshape messages as they flow through a connector
D.Kafka offset — the position of a record within a partition
A.Replica — the framework of reusable source and sink connectors that streams data between Kafka and external systems without custom producer or consumer code
B.Replica — the producer setting requiring all in-sync replicas to acknowledge a write
C.Replica — the unit of parallelism and ordering within a topic
D.Replica — a copy of a partition stored on another broker; one is the leader and the others follow for fault tolerance
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