20 October 2020

#Apache_Kafka

#Apache_Kafka

Key Concepts


Topic Sub-Topics Basic Intermediate Advanced Expert
Introduction What is Kafka, Features, Advantages, Use cases
Architecture Brokers, Clusters, Zookeeper, Partitions, Replication
Producers Producer API, Key/Value, Partitioning, Async vs Sync
Consumers Consumer API, Consumer Groups, Offsets, Rebalancing
Topics & Partitions Topic creation, Partitioning strategy, Replication factor
Message Delivery At-most-once, At-least-once, Exactly-once, Acknowledgements
Kafka Streams Stream processing, KStream, KTable, State stores
Kafka Connect Source connectors, Sink connectors, Connector configuration
Monitoring & Metrics JMX metrics, Kafka monitoring tools, Lag monitoring
Security SSL, SASL, ACLs, Encryption, Authentication
Fault Tolerance & Reliability Replication, ISR, Leader/follower, Failover
Advanced Topics Log compaction, Exactly-once semantics, Transactions, Custom partitioners
Performance Tuning Producer tuning, Consumer tuning, Broker tuning, Batch size
Administration Kafka CLI, Topic management, Consumer group management, Broker configuration
Best Practices Partition strategy, Scaling, Retention policies, Message ordering

Interview question

1. Introduction & Basics

  1. What is Apache Kafka?
  2. What are the main features of Kafka?
  3. Explain the advantages of Kafka over traditional messaging systems.
  4. What are the common use cases of Kafka?
  5. How does Kafka achieve high throughput?
  6. What is a Kafka broker?
  7. What is a Kafka cluster?
  8. What is a Kafka topic?
  9. What are partitions in Kafka?
  10. How does Kafka differ from RabbitMQ?
  11. What is the role of Zookeeper in Kafka?
  12. What is the difference between a producer and a consumer?
  13. What is the difference between Kafka and JMS?
  14. How does Kafka achieve fault tolerance?
  15. How does Kafka handle backpressure?
  16. Explain the publish-subscribe model in Kafka.
  17. Explain the queue-based model in Kafka.
  18. What are the main components of Kafka?
  19. What is Kafka Streams?
  20. What is Kafka Connect?

2. Architecture

  1. Explain the Kafka architecture.
  2. What is a leader and a follower in Kafka?
  3. What is replication in Kafka?
  4. What is ISR (In-Sync Replica)?
  5. How does Kafka achieve message durability?
  6. How are offsets maintained in Kafka?
  7. How does Kafka maintain message ordering?
  8. What is a log segment in Kafka?
  9. What is the difference between a topic and a partition?
  10. How does Kafka handle network partitions?
  11. What is the role of controller nodes in Kafka?
  12. How does Kafka handle broker failures?
  13. What is log compaction?
  14. What is log retention?
  15. How does Kafka handle data replication across nodes?
  16. How does Kafka ensure exactly-once delivery semantics?
  17. What is the role of Zookeeper in managing brokers?
  18. How does Kafka handle leader election?
  19. Explain the difference between leader and follower replication.
  20. What is the difference between Kafka cluster and a single broker setup?

3. Producers

  1. What is a Kafka producer?
  2. How to send messages synchronously?
  3. How to send messages asynchronously?
  4. How to implement custom partitioners?
  5. What is batching in Kafka producers?
  6. What are acknowledgements (acks)?
  7. Difference between acks=0, acks=1, acks=all.
  8. How to ensure message delivery reliability?
  9. How to handle retries in Kafka producer?
  10. How to implement idempotent producers?
  11. How to monitor producer metrics?
  12. What is compression in Kafka producer?
  13. How to choose between key-based and round-robin partitioning?
  14. What is the maximum message size in Kafka?
  15. How to handle serialization in Kafka producer?
  16. How to implement error handling in producer?
  17. How to integrate producer with Spring Kafka?
  18. How to implement transactions in producer?
  19. How to handle producer failures gracefully?
  20. How to configure producer buffer size?

4. Consumers

  1. What is a Kafka consumer?
  2. What is a consumer group?
  3. How does Kafka handle consumer rebalancing?
  4. How to commit offsets manually?
  5. How to commit offsets automatically?
  6. Difference between automatic and manual commit.
  7. How to handle duplicate messages?
  8. How to achieve exactly-once consumption?
  9. How to consume messages from multiple topics?
  10. How to monitor consumer lag?
  11. How to assign partitions to consumers manually?
  12. What is the role of group coordinator?
  13. How to implement backpressure handling in consumers?
  14. How to handle out-of-order messages?
  15. How to implement message filtering in consumers?
  16. How to reset consumer offsets?
  17. How to consume messages from the beginning?
  18. How to consume messages from the latest offset?
  19. How to scale consumers in a group?
  20. How to implement error handling in consumers?

5. Topics & Partitions

  1. How to create topics in Kafka?
  2. How to delete topics?
  3. How to configure partition count?
  4. How to configure replication factor?
  5. How to check topic configuration?
  6. How to increase partitions of an existing topic?
  7. What is log compaction?
  8. How to handle retention policy?
  9. How to implement message ordering in partitions?
  10. How to handle large messages in partitions?
  11. Difference between topic-level and partition-level configuration.
  12. How to monitor topic metrics?
  13. How to handle topic deletion safety?
  14. How to implement topic-level security?
  15. How to choose partition key?
  16. How to handle uneven message distribution across partitions?
  17. How to check partition leaders?
  18. How to rebalance partitions manually?
  19. How to configure topic cleanup policies?
  20. How to implement multiple topics in one Kafka cluster?

6. Message Delivery

  1. What is at-most-once delivery?
  2. What is at-least-once delivery?
  3. What is exactly-once delivery?
  4. How does Kafka achieve exactly-once semantics?
  5. How to handle message duplication?
  6. How to configure producer acknowledgements?
  7. How to implement transactional messaging?
  8. Difference between idempotent and transactional producers.
  9. How to configure retries for messages?
  10. How to monitor message delivery failures?
  11. How to implement dead-letter queues?
  12. How to handle partial failures in delivery?
  13. How to debug delivery issues?
  14. How to configure message timeout?
  15. How to ensure message ordering across partitions?
  16. How to handle network failures during message delivery?
  17. How to handle message compression?
  18. How to implement message priority?
  19. How to handle batch message failures?
  20. How to test message delivery reliability?

7. Kafka Streams

  1. What is Kafka Streams?
  2. Difference between KStream and KTable.
  3. How to implement stream processing?
  4. How to perform joins in streams?
  5. How to handle stateful stream processing?
  6. What are state stores?
  7. How to implement windowed aggregations?
  8. How to handle stream failures?
  9. How to scale Kafka Streams applications?
  10. How to maintain exactly-once processing in streams?
  11. How to materialize KTables?
  12. How to implement aggregation and counting?
  13. How to implement filtering in streams?
  14. How to perform transformations in streams?
  15. How to integrate Kafka Streams with Spring Boot?
  16. How to implement joins between streams and tables?
  17. How to manage changelogs in streams?
  18. How to debug Kafka Streams applications?
  19. How to perform rolling updates in Kafka Streams?
  20. How to handle late-arriving data in streams?

8. Kafka Connect

  1. What is Kafka Connect?
  2. Difference between source and sink connectors.
  3. How to configure Kafka Connect?
  4. How to implement custom connectors?
  5. How to monitor connector performance?
  6. How to scale Kafka Connect clusters?
  7. How to handle errors in connectors?
  8. How to perform data transformations in connectors?
  9. How to integrate databases with Kafka using connectors?
  10. How to implement bulk imports and exports?
  11. How to handle connector restarts?
  12. How to handle schema evolution?
  13. How to monitor task-level metrics?
  14. How to manage connector offsets?
  15. How to implement fault-tolerant connectors?
  16. How to configure retries for connectors?
  17. How to test custom connectors?
  18. How to secure Kafka Connect endpoints?
  19. How to integrate Kafka Connect with cloud services?
  20. How to manage multiple connectors in one cluster?

9. Monitoring & Security

  1. How to monitor Kafka metrics using JMX?
  2. How to monitor broker health?
  3. How to monitor consumer lag?
  4. How to use Kafka Manager for monitoring?
  5. How to secure Kafka with SSL?
  6. How to configure SASL authentication?
  7. How to implement ACLs in Kafka?
  8. How to encrypt data at rest in Kafka?
  9. How to audit Kafka access?
  10. How to monitor topic-level metrics?
  11. How to monitor producer metrics?
  12. How to monitor consumer metrics?
  13. How to set alerts for broker failures?
  14. How to monitor cluster replication?
  15. How to detect under-replicated partitions?
  16. How to monitor request latencies?
  17. How to configure Kafka security policies?
  18. How to rotate SSL certificates for Kafka?
  19. How to manage authentication tokens?
  20. How to implement security best practices in Kafka?

10. Advanced Topics & Performance

  1. What is log compaction?
  2. How to implement exactly-once semantics with transactions?
  3. How to tune producer performance?
  4. How to tune consumer performance?
  5. How to tune broker configuration for high throughput?
  6. How to handle large messages efficiently?
  7. How to implement disaster recovery?
  8. How to handle broker failures gracefully?
  9. How to implement multi-datacenter replication?
  10. How to scale Kafka clusters horizontally?
  11. How to optimize partition count for performance?
  12. How to implement transactional messaging at scale?
  13. How to debug Kafka performance bottlenecks?
  14. How to configure batch sizes for high throughput?
  15. How to manage topic retention for large datasets?
  16. How to implement partition reassignment?
  17. How to use Kafka for event sourcing?
  18. How to integrate Kafka with Spark or Flink?
  19. How to monitor Kafka Streams for performance?
  20. Best practices for Kafka cluster design.

11. Kafka Internals & Expert Topics

  1. How does Kafka handle message serialization?
  2. How does Kafka handle message deserialization?
  3. How does Kafka implement replication protocol?
  4. How are messages appended to logs?
  5. What is the role of the leader epoch?
  6. How does Kafka implement ISR and leader election?
  7. How to handle log segment rolling?
  8. How to handle disk failures in Kafka?
  9. How does Kafka handle garbage collection?
  10. How to implement idempotent producers internally?
  11. How does Kafka implement transactions under the hood?
  12. How to debug Kafka cluster state?
  13. How to handle network partitions?
  14. How does Kafka manage memory and caching?
  15. How does Kafka handle message ordering at scale?
  16. How to implement compaction and cleanup efficiently?
  17. How does Kafka handle follower lag?
  18. How to perform broker decommissioning safely?
  19. How to handle schema evolution with Avro/Protobuf?
  20. How to manage multi-tenancy in Kafka?

12. Kafka Best Practices

  1. How to choose the right partition key?
  2. How to design topic retention policies?
  3. How to scale producers and consumers?
  4. How to handle high-throughput pipelines?
  5. How to manage offsets for reliability?
  6. How to implement secure messaging?
  7. How to monitor Kafka performance continuously?
  8. How to implement multi-cluster replication?
  9. How to perform rolling upgrades without downtime?
  10. How to handle large-scale event-driven architectures?
  11. How to plan cluster sizing for expected load?
  12. How to handle log retention for regulatory compliance?
  13. How to implement testing pipelines with Kafka?
  14. How to integrate Kafka with CI/CD pipelines?
  15. How to optimize producer and consumer configs for latency?
  16. How to handle schema evolution in production?
  17. How to implement idempotency in consumers?
  18. How to plan partition count for growth?
  19. How to implement disaster recovery and failover strategies?
  20. Best practices for Kafka security and access control.

13. Use Cases & Case Studies

  1. How to implement event sourcing with Kafka?
  2. How to implement CQRS with Kafka?
  3. How to use Kafka for log aggregation?
  4. How to implement messaging for microservices?
  5. How to implement stream processing pipelines?
  6. How to integrate Kafka with Spark/Flink for analytics?
  7. How to implement real-time monitoring with Kafka?
  8. How to implement data lake ingestion with Kafka?
  9. How to implement multi-region replication for high availability?
  10. How to implement IoT messaging with Kafka?


Related Topics


   Kafka_Introduction