How much we know about Series — Kafka

Here we will have 100+ questions which we should know to be practically relevant and say we know Kafka well. You can use these questions when you kick start your Kafka journey or for a quick interview prep barometer. These questions are very general ones and implementation specific question may still get left out(you know universe is wast and its difficult to comprehend everything on page, but I will try my level best)

Finding answers and learning Kafka: I will be adding resources to learn Kafka in the quickest time at the bottom of the page. These tranings may have a cost or may be available for free.

General Knowledge:

1. What is Kafka, past history, creators information do you have?
2. What makes Kafka so cool?
3. What support is available for Kafka?
4. What is Confluent Kafka?
5. Who maintains Kafka?
6. What are Kafka alternate/equivalent /competing services in market within Azure/AWS/GCP?

Architecture

1. How can you setup Kafka in your organization?
2. What is Kafka Cloud?
3. How can you setup Kafka in Azure, AWS and GCP?
4. How can you spin Kafka on your workstation or in On-Prem environment?
5. What are the best practices setting up Kafka?
6. What are different components of Kafka?
7. What is a Kafka Consumer, Producer, Partition, Topic, Offset?
8. What do you mean/know about Kafka Cluster and Kafka Broker?
9. What is a Kafka Broker? Mostly its a VM/Server hosting Kafka process.
10. What is the role of Zookeeper within Kafka architecture?
11. What is in sync replica(ISR) in Kafka?
12. How does replication work in Kafka? Do you know role of ISR and replication factor?
13. How does load balancing works in Kafka?
14. What is a good broker configuration for kafka production setup?
15. What are different types of message acknowledgements in Kafka?
16. What happens if a broker crashes? Does Kafka have ability to recover and able to server messages from available brokers in the configuration?
17. What is a message key in Kafka?
18. What do you mean by Kafka Group Coordinator and Consumer Coordinator?

Design Question

1. What are usage patterns/use cases of Kafka? What kind of applications can use Kafka?
2. How can you consume Kafka services?
3. How can you setup streams/subscriptions within Kafka?
4. Or Alternate to above — How is Kafka configured?
5. How is event/massage security ensured in Kafka?
6. How is Kafka different from an API Management layer?

Standards and Best Practices

1. When should you actually consider Kafka?
2. How can you scale Kafka?
3. How can you handle disaster management of Kafka infrastructure?
4. Resiliency?
5. Availability
6. Scalability?
7. Security?

Capacity Planning

1. How to estimate broker number in a Kafka cluster?

If you are looking to learn Kafka, try this page for step wise guide:

Learning Kafka: Where to start and the journey forward