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Kafka - Interview Questions

Kafka is an open-source message broker developed by Apache, known for its features like data partitioning, scalability, and low-latency, making it ideal for real-time data integration and processing. Key components include topics, producers, brokers, and consumers, with Zookeeper managing offsets and server coordination. Kafka's architecture is distributed, utilizing partitions and offsets for efficient message handling, and it is preferred over traditional message transfer techniques due to its scalability and robustness.

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14 views4 pages

Kafka - Interview Questions

Kafka is an open-source message broker developed by Apache, known for its features like data partitioning, scalability, and low-latency, making it ideal for real-time data integration and processing. Key components include topics, producers, brokers, and consumers, with Zookeeper managing offsets and server coordination. Kafka's architecture is distributed, utilizing partitions and offsets for efficient message handling, and it is preferred over traditional message transfer techniques due to its scalability and robustness.

Uploaded by

Suresh
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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1. How will you define Kafka?

Kafka is an open-source message broker project that is written in Scala


programming language and it is an initiative by Apache Software Foundation. A
unique set of features make it most suitable choice for the data integration and one
of the leading data processing tools of choice.

2. What are the main features of Kafka that make it suitable for data
integration and data processing in real-time?
Some of the most highlighting features of Kafka that make it popular worldwide
includes – data partitioning, scalability, low-latency, high throughputs etc. These
features are the reason why Kafka had become the most suitable choice for data
integration and data processing in the real-time.

3. What are the major components of Kafka integration product?

• Topic–The messages stream that belongs to the same pattern.


• Producer–It helps in publishing messages to the topic.
• Broker –This is a set of various servers where all published data is stored.
• Consumer–It subscribes to the different topics and fetch data from the
brokers.

4. Explain the offset in Kafka data integration tool?


Messages are stored in partitions and assigneda unique ID to each of them for quick
and easy access. That unique number is named as the offset that is responsible to
identify each of the messages in the partition.

5. What is Zookeeper and Is it possible to run Kafka without


Zookeeper?
Zookeeper is used to stored offset values of messages. There is no alternative of
Zookeeper in Kafka. In case, Zookeeper is down then this is not possible to serve
any of the client requests.

6. What is the meaning of Leader and Follower in Kafka?


Every partition in Kafka has one main server that is named as “Leader” and one or
more non-connected servers that are named as the “Followers”.

7. What is a consumer group in Kafka?


A Consumer group is made up of one or more consumers that together subscribe to
the different topics and fetch data from the brokers.

8. How to balance loads in Kafka when one server fails?


Every partition in Kafka has one main server that plays the role of a leader and one
or more non-connected servers that are named as the followers. Here, the leading
server sets the permission and rest of the servers just follow him accordingly. In
case, leading server fails then followers take the responsibility of the main server.

9. Do you know any traditional technique of message transfer?


Yes, these techniques are queuing, and publish-subscribe. However, Kafka
generalizes both of the techniques through consumer group.

10. How is Kafka preferred over traditional message transfer


techniques?
Kafka product is more scalable, faster, robust and distributed by design.

11. Explain the meaning of broker in Kafka?


Broker and server have the meaning in Kafka.

12. Explain the maximum size of a message that can be received by


the Kafka?
It is approx. 1000000 bytes.

13. Do you know how to improve the throughput of the remote


consumer?
Well, it is interesting and advance concept in Kafka. If the consumer is located in the
distant location then you need to optimize the socket buffer size to tune the overall
throughput of a remote consumer.

14. Do replication is necessary or just a waste of time in Kafka?


Replicating messages is a good practice in Kafka that assure that messages will
never lose even if the main server fails.

15. Is it possible to get the offset value of the message once it is


produced already?
No, we cannot do that.

16. What is the main difference between Kafka and Fume?


Both products are used to process data in the real-time but Kafka is proven more
scalable and ensures durability.

17. Explain the role of producer API in Kafka?


A producer API exposes the functionalities of all producers through a single API to
the client.

18. In the producer, when there comes the situation of queue


fullness?
If there are not enough number of servers added for load balancing, there comes a
situation of queue fullness.

19. How to initiate the Kafka server? Do you know the process?
Yes, I know. To initiate the Kafka server, you need to initiate the Zookeeper server
first then you could fire up the Kafka server.

20. How will you explain the Kafka architecture?


Kafka product is based on a distributed design where one cluster has multiple
brokers/servers associated with it. The ‘Topic’ will be divided into plenty of partitions
to store the messages and there is one consumer group to fetch the messages from
brokers.

21.What are partitions and offsets in Kafka Topics?

Kafka cluster maintains a partition of logs for each Kafka Topic. Each partition is a
structured commit log containing a sequence of ordered, immutable records that is
continuously appended to.
Each of the records in the partition are assigned a sequence number, called the offset,
that uniquely identifies each record within each partition.

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