Kafka MCQs – Kafka in Production & Testing

Deploying Apache Kafka in production and testing environments requires a solid understanding of performance tuning, monitoring, reliability, and fault tolerance. This section includes multiple choice questions (MCQs) focused on Kafka’s operational aspects, such as production readiness, testing strategies, performance benchmarks, log retention, durability, and monitoring tools.

These MCQs are designed to help engineers prepare for real-world interviews, Kafka certifications, and practical deployment scenarios with confidence.

1.) What is the recommended replication factor for critical Kafka topics in production?

A) 1
B) 2
C) 3
D) 5

Answer: Option C

Explanation: A replication factor of 3 is considered standard in production for high availability and fault tolerance.

2.) Which tool is commonly used to monitor Kafka performance?

A) Jenkins
B) Prometheus
C) Maven
D) Selenium

Answer: Option B

Explanation: Prometheus is widely used for monitoring Kafka metrics via JMX exporters.

3.) Kafka ensures message durability using:

A) Write-ahead logs on disk
B) Zookeeper
C) Log compaction
D) RAM-based queues

Answer: Option A

Explanation: Kafka stores messages in durable disk logs before acknowledging producers.

4.) Which Kafka parameter controls how long messages are retained?

A) log.retention.time
B) retention.ms
C) log.retention.ms
D) retention.hours

Answer: Option C

Explanation: log.retention.ms defines the retention period in milliseconds.

5.) How can you reduce message loss in production Kafka clusters?

A) Use single-partition topics
B) Disable replication
C) Use acks=all and replication factor >= 3
D) Disable producer retries

Answer: Option C

Explanation: This ensures that data is acknowledged only after being replicated successfully to all in-sync replicas.

6.) What does ISR stand for in Kafka?

A) Internal Storage Registry
B) In-Sync Replica
C) Instant Server Reboot
D) Indexed Segment Record

Answer: Option B

Explanation: ISR includes all replicas that are up-to-date with the leader partition.

7.) What’s the purpose of Kafka’s min.insync.replicas config?

A) Sets minimum consumer threads
B) Defines minimum number of log segments
C) Manages Zookeeper connections
D) Controls minimum replicas that must acknowledge write

Answer: Option D

Explanation: This config is crucial for durability and defines how many replicas must be in-sync before accepting writes.

8.) Which testing strategy is best for validating Kafka-based applications?

A) Load testing only
B) Contract testing
C) Integration testing
D) GUI testing

Answer: Option C

Explanation: Kafka applications should be tested in a near-production setup for message flow and processing accuracy.

9.) Which Kafka feature allows for infinite retention of the latest value per key?

A) Consumer offset reset
B) Compaction
C) Mirroring
D) Throttling

Answer: Option B

Explanation: Log compaction retains the latest record for each key indefinitely.

10.) In a test environment, what tool is best to simulate Kafka producers and consumers?

A) Apache Bench
B) Kafka Console Producer/Consumer
C) MySQL Shell
D) Mongo Compass

Answer: Option B

Explanation: These command-line tools are great for basic testing of Kafka clusters.

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