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What is Apache Kafka?
Questions in this quiz
What is Apache Kafka?
What is a Kafka "broker," and how does a Kafka cluster typically consist of multiple brokers?
What is a Kafka "offset," and what does it represent for a consumer reading from a partition?
What does it mean that Kafka retains messages for a CONFIGURABLE retention period (or size limit), rather than immediately deleting a message once it has been consumed (as many traditional message queues do)?
What is a "log compaction" retention policy in Kafka, as an alternative to simple time/size-based retention?
What is "replication" in Kafka, and what fault-tolerance guarantee does having multiple replicas of a partition provide?
What does "at-least-once" delivery semantics mean in the context of Kafka (and message queue systems generally), and what does it imply a consumer needs to be designed to handle?
What is a general reason a team might choose Kafka specifically over a more traditional message broker like RabbitMQ for a given messaging/event-driven use case?
What is a "rebalance" in a Kafka consumer group, and when does it typically occur?
What is "event sourcing," as an architectural pattern, and why is Kafka often well-suited as its underlying storage/transport mechanism?
What does it mean that Kafka messages within a single partition are strictly ORDERED, and what is the important caveat about ordering ACROSS multiple partitions of the same topic?
What is a reasonable general guideline for how many partitions to configure for a new Kafka topic, considering the tradeoffs involved?