CCDAK Exam Dumps - Confluent Certified Developer Questions and Answers

According to the official Apache Kafka consumer semantics documentation, at-most-once delivery means that records may be lost but must never be processed more than once. To achieve this guarantee, a consumer must commit offsets before processing records. If the application crashes after committing but before processing, messages are skipped rather than reprocessed, which satisfies at-most-once semantics.

Option B correctly implements this pattern. It disables automatic offset commits (enable.auto.commit=false) and explicitly calls commitAsync() immediately after polling and before processing records. This ensures that offsets are advanced regardless of whether processing succeeds, eliminating the possibility of duplicate processing.

Option C represents at-least-once semantics, because offsets are committed after processing, which can lead to duplicates on failure. Options A and D rely on automatic commits or incorrect ordering and do not provide strict at-most-once guarantees.

The Kafka documentation explicitly states that manual offset management with commits before processing is required for at-most-once delivery.

Therefore, Option B is the best and officially documented configuration and code skeleton to avoid duplicate message processing.

The onCompletion() method of Kafka’s Callback interface is executed once the broker acknowledges the message. This includes success or failure, and it is invoked asynchronously by the producer.

From Kafka Java Client API Documentation:

“The onCompletion method will be called when the record sent to the server has been acknowledged, or when an error occurs.”

This ensures that the record was sent and acknowledged, not just added to a batch or local buffer.

Apache Kafka does not impose any schema or message format; it treats records as byte arrays on the wire. Serialization is therefore the responsibility of the producer. For lightweight XML messages, the most common and recommended approach is to represent the XML as a UTF-8 encoded string and use Kafka’s built-in StringSerializer.

The official Kafka producer documentation provides StringSerializer as the standard serializer for textual data formats, including XML and JSON. This serializer converts Java String objects into byte arrays using UTF-8 encoding, making it simple, efficient, and interoperable with a wide range of consumers.

Option A is incorrect because Kafka does not provide a built-in XmlSerializer. Option C (ByteSerializer) could technically work, but it would require manually converting the XML string to a byte array, which adds unnecessary complexity for lightweight XML payloads. Option D (VoidSerializer) is used only when no value is sent and is not applicable here.

Therefore, using StringSerializer for the value field is the correct and officially supported approach for sending lightweight XML messages in Kafka.

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According to the Apache Kafka consumer and scalability documentation, parallelism in message processing is primarily determined by the number of partitions and the number of consumers within a consumer group. Each partition can be assigned to only one consumer at a time. In this scenario, the topic already has four partitions, but only two consumers are processing them, meaning only two partitions are actively consumed in parallel.

Since monitoring indicates that message processing is CPU-bound, the bottleneck is not Kafka I/O but application-side processing. Adding more consumers (up to the number of partitions) allows Kafka to rebalance the partitions and distribute them across more consumer instances, increasing CPU parallelism and reducing lag.

Option A (adding more partitions) can increase parallelism but is more intrusive and may require repartitioning considerations for keys and downstream systems. Option B increases batch size, which can worsen CPU pressure. Option D may reduce per-poll workload but does not increase parallel processing capacity.

Therefore, the correct and recommended action per Kafka documentation is to add more consumers to the consumer group.

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The official CLI utility for consuming messages from Kafka topics is kafka-console-consumer.sh. It connects to the broker, consumes messages, and prints them to standard output.

From Kafka CLI Tools Documentation:

"kafka-console-consumer.sh is used to read data from a Kafka topic and write it to standard output."

The other options are not valid Kafka CLI tools.

If the consumer fails to send heartbeats in time (due to being slow under load), it is considered dead, causing a rebalance. Increasing session.timeout.ms gives the consumer more time to process messages and send heartbeats, preventing premature removal.

From Kafka Docs > Heartbeats and Failures:

“If the consumer does not send a heartbeat in session.timeout.ms, it is considered dead and the group coordinator will trigger a rebalance.”

Reducing max.poll.records might slow consumption further. More consumers won’t help since each partition already has a dedicated consumer.

max.poll.interval.ms defines the maximum delay between invocations of poll() before the consumer is considered failed. It essentially gives consumers more time to process records before needing to poll again.

From Kafka Consumer Configuration Reference:

“max.poll.interval.ms: The maximum delay between invocations of poll() when using consumer group management. If poll() is not called before expiration, the consumer is considered failed.”

session.timeout.ms and heartbeat.interval.ms relate to group coordination and heartbeats.

fetch.max.wait.ms affects how long the broker waits to accumulate data before sending a fetch response.

With acks=all and min.insync.replicas=2, Kafka requires at least two in-sync replicas to acknowledge a write. If only one broker is alive, the condition fails, and NotEnoughReplicasException is thrown by the producer.

From Kafka Producer Exception Docs:

“NotEnoughReplicasException is thrown when the number of in-sync replicas is insufficient to satisfy acks=all with min.insync.replicas.”

NetworkException is generic and not raised here.

NotCoordinatorException is related to consumer group coordination.

NotLeaderForPartitionException is unrelated unless accessing an unassigned leader.

The default maximum message size that a Kafka broker accepts is 1MB (1,048,576 bytes), controlled by the config property message.max.bytes.

From Kafka Broker Configuration Docs:

“The default maximum message size is 1MB. To accept larger messages, configure message.max.bytes and the producer’s max.request.size.”

Producers also have a matching limit via max.request.size, and consumers via fetch.message.max.bytes.

The official Apache Kafka Connect documentation explains that connectors run within the same worker JVM, and all logs are written through the worker’s logging framework (Log4j or Log4j2). To isolate logs for a specific connector, Kafka Connect supports connector-specific logging contexts, which can be routed to separate log files using logging configuration.

By modifying the log4j.properties (or log4j2.xml) file to define a dedicated logger and appender for the connector’s package or class name, you can direct logs from that connector to a separate file. This is the recommended and documented approach for debugging individual connectors in a shared Connect cluster.

Option A is incorrect because there is no generic “enable connector context” switch. Option B may increase verbosity but does not isolate logs per connector. Option D is false; Kafka Connect explicitly supports connector-level log separation through logging configuration.

Therefore, the correct approach is to configure a dedicated log appender for the specific connector.