AGlobalKTableis a replicated, read-only table available in full on all instances. It's best forreference or lookup datasetssuch as:

Product catalog

Customer profiles

Warehouse inventory

FromKafka Streams Developer Guide:

“Use GlobalKTable when you need to perform joins using non-partition-aligned reference data that's small enough to replicate.”

Purchases and transactions are high-throughput, time-sensitive streams, not static reference data.

To ensureexactly-once deliveryand avoid duplicates even during retries:

enable.idempotence=trueensures deduplication on the broker

retries=2147483647allows unlimited retries on retriable errors

max.in.flight.requests.per.connection=5is themaximum value that preserves message order with idempotence

FromKafka Producer Config Docs:

“To achieve exactly-once semantics, set enable.idempotence=true, and max.in.flight.requests.per.connection ≤ 5.”

A is unrelated (consumer-side)

C disables retries

D disables idempotence, leading to duplicates

To increase consumerthroughput, one effective strategy is toincrease the amount of datafetched in each poll by raisingfetch.max.bytesormax.partition.fetch.bytes. This allows each poll to retrieve more records per request, improving processing efficiency.

FromKafka Consumer Config Docs:

“Increasing fetch size allows consumers to retrieve larger batches of messages, improving throughput and reducing request overhead.”

Removing consumers (A) may reduce parallelism.

Manual commit (C) adds complexity, not throughput.

Decreasing session timeout (D) risks unnecessary rebalances.

A409 Conflictresponse in Kafka Connect REST API usually means:

The connector name provided already exists (i.e., a connector with that name is already deployed).

The Kafka Connect cluster is temporarily unavailable to accept new tasks due toa rebalance in progress.

From theConfluent Developer documentationand Kafka Connect REST API spec:

“409 – Conflict. The connector name is already in use or the worker group is in the process of rebalancing and cannot complete the request at this time.”

Option A is incorrect because invalid configurations return400 Bad Request, not 409.

Option B is invalid because Kafka Connect does not have a strict concept of "capacity" that prevents connector creation with a 409.

To change the replication factor of an existing topic, you must perform apartition reassignment, because the replication factor is not directly modifiable via kafka-topics.sh. Thekafka-reassign-partitions.shtool is the official command-line utility to handle partition reassignments, including changing the replication factor.

This tool allows you to generate a reassignment JSON specifying new replica assignments per partition and then apply it.

From official documentation:

“To change the replication factor, use the kafka-reassign-partitions tool to assign the partitions to more or fewer brokers.”

Neither kafka-topics.sh nor kafka-reassign-topics.sh exists for this purpose, and kafka-recreate-topic.sh isnotan official Kafka tool.

For real-time applications, thekey metric to monitor is consumer lag— the difference between thelatest offset on the brokerand thelast committed offset by the consumer.

FromKafka Monitoring Guide:

“Consumer lag is the most important metric for real-time applications. It tells you how far behind the consumer is from the latest data in Kafka.”

B relates to replication, not client responsiveness.

C tracks group membership stability, not data delay.

D tracks input throughput, not processing latency.

Frequentrebalancesin a consumer group occur when:

Consumers are too slowand miss heartbeats (A), or

Instances crash or restart, triggering group membership changes (D)

FromKafka Consumer Group Coordination Docs:

“If a consumer fails to send a heartbeat in time (due to slowness or crash), it is removed from the group, causing a rebalance.”

Option B (partition mismatch) affectsload balancing, not rebalance frequency.

Option C (broker storage) doesn't trigger consumer rebalances.

To skip a corrupted record and avoid failing the application, you mustseek past the failed offsetmanually using consumer.seek(). This allows the application to resume consumption from the next offset.

FromKafka Consumer Error Handling Docs:

“On deserialization failure, you can catch RecordDeserializationException, log the error, and call seek() to the next offset to skip the bad record.”

A does not prevent re-processing the bad record.

C is invalid; there'sno skip() methodin the Kafka consumer API.

D results in service interruption — not ideal for resiliency.

The default maximum message size that a Kafka broker accepts is1MB (1,048,576 bytes), controlled by the config propertymessage.max.bytes.

FromKafka Broker Configuration Docs:

“The default maximum message size is 1MB. To accept larger messages, configure message.max.bytes and the producer’s max.request.size.”

Producers also have a matching limit via max.request.size, and consumers via fetch.message.max.bytes.

TheStickyAssignortries to minimize partition movement bypreserving existing assignmentsas much as possible while still achieving a balanced assignment. This improvesconsumer stabilityand reduces rebalances.

From theKafka Consumer Assignor Documentation:

“The StickyAssignor attempts topreserve as many existing assignments as possible, which helps minimize partition movement between rebalances.”

RoundRobinAssignor focuses on even distribution, not stability.

RangeAssignor groups partitions by topic and assigns them consecutively, but can lead to imbalances.

PartitionAssignor is an abstract base class, not an assignor used directly.

Kafka Streams usestransactional producersto guaranteeexactly-once semantics (EOS). This ensures that both theoutput recordsandstate store updatesare committed atomically, avoiding duplication or partial writes.

FromKafka Streams Documentation > Processing Guarantees:

“Kafka Streams leveragesKafka’s transactional APIsto commit the output records and internal state updatesas a single atomic unit, thereby providing exactly-once semantics.”

Option A is incorrect because log compaction is not disabled for EOS.

Option C incorrectly describes a checkpointing system Kafka Streams does not use.

Option D refers to deduplication, which is not how EOS is achieved in Streams.

If amessage key is not provided, Kafka’s default partitioner usesround-robin distributionacross available partitions.

FromKafka Producer Design:

“If no key is provided, the default partitioner distributes messages round-robin to available partitions.”

A is incorrect — not all go to partition 0.

C is invalid — Kafka doesn’t group messages into one segment without a key.

D is false — ordering isnot preservedacross partitions without a key.

This syntax is a clear match toProtocol Buffers (Protobuf). It defines a schema with fields, types, and tags, which is a format supported by Kafka when usingProtobuf-based schema registry serialization.

FromConfluent Schema Registry Docs:

“Kafka supports Protobuf serialization, where schemas are written in .proto files and include fields with tags.”

int32, double, and string are standard Protobuf types.

Avro uses JSON-style schema.

JSON Schema uses JSON object structure, not .proto.

YAML is unrelated.

For Kafka Streams to performjoins, topics must beco-partitioned, meaning:

They have thesame number of partitions(A), and

They use thesame partitioning strategy(typically by key) (B)

FromKafka Streams Documentation > Joins:

“Co-partitioning is required for Kafka Streams joins. Topics must have the same number of partitions and use the same key-based partitioner.”

Value schema (C) and retention time (D) have no bearing on join compatibility.

unclean.leader.election.enable=false→ Prevents data loss by only considering in-sync replicas when rebalancing.

replication.factor→ Specifies how many redundant copies of partitions are distributed across brokers.

min.insync.replicas=2→ Sets the standard for the number of partition instances that must keep up with the latest committed message.

unclean.leader.election.enable=false ensures that onlyin-sync replicascan be elected as leaders. If disabled, an out-of-sync replica may become leader, potentially leading to data loss.

replication.factor defineshow many brokerswill maintain copies of each partition, directly impacting durability and availability.

min.insync.replicas determineshow many replicas must acknowledgea write when acks=all is used, enforcing write durability.