Authentic Confluent Certification Exam CCDAK Questions Answers

Kafka Connect can run in standalone mode or distributed mode. For simple tasks like reading logs from a file on a single host, standalone mode is recommended.

From Kafka Connect User Guide:

“Standalone mode is useful when running connectors on a single machine (e.g., for development or simple deployments like log collection from a local file).”

Distributed mode is preferred for scalability and fault tolerance but overkill for this use case.

According to the official Apache Kafka Connect documentation, RegexRouter is the SMT specifically designed to dynamically change the destination topic name of records produced by a connector. It works by applying a regular expression to the original topic name and rewriting it to a new topic name.

This makes RegexRouter the correct choice when some records must be routed to a different topic, typically in combination with connector-level logic, predicates, or multiple connectors. It is commonly used for topic renaming, topic versioning, or routing records to alternate topics.

InsertField (Option B) only adds metadata fields (such as topic, partition, or timestamp) to the record payload and does not affect routing. TombstoneHandler (Option C) is used to manage null-value records, especially with compacted topics. HeaderFrom (Option D) copies fields into headers but does not change the target topic.

Therefore, RegexRouter is the only SMT that directly supports changing the output topic, as documented in the Kafka Connect SMT reference.

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According to the official Apache Kafka consumer documentation, the auto.offset.reset configuration is only applied when a consumer has no valid committed offset for a partition. In this scenario, the consumer last committed offset 217, but the topic’s earliest available offset is now 318. This means the previously committed offset is out of range, most likely due to topic retention cleanup.

When a committed offset is out of range, Kafka treats it as invalid and applies the auto.offset.reset policy. Since the consumer is configured with auto.offset.reset=latest, it will start reading from the end of the log, not from the earliest available offset.

Kafka defines the “latest” offset as the log end offset, which is the offset of the next message to be written. Given that the topic’s offsets end at 588, the next offset is 589.

Therefore, the consumer will start reading from offset 589, skipping all existing records in the topic, which aligns with the documented Kafka consumer behavior.

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