InterviewRoadmap.dev Kafka

Interview questions

50 real Kafka interview questions, each with the interviewer's goal, a quick answer, a senior-level answer, an in-depth explanation, a financial example, and common pitfalls.

Question 1What is Apache Kafka?

Mid-levelSeniorTech Lead

Question 2What problem does Kafka solve?

Mid-levelSeniorTech Lead

Question 3Is Kafka a queue?

Mid-levelSeniorTech Lead

Question 4When should you choose Kafka?

SeniorTech Lead

Question 5When should you not choose Kafka?

SeniorTech Lead

Question 6Kafka versus RabbitMQ

SeniorTech Lead

Question 7Kafka versus AWS SQS

SeniorTech Lead

Question 8Kafka versus Google Pub/Sub

SeniorTech Lead

Question 9What is a Producer?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 10Can a Producer be a microservice?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 11What is a Broker?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 12What is a Kafka Cluster?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 13What is a Topic?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 14What is a Partition?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 15Why do Partitions exist?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 16How do you choose the number of Partitions?

SeniorTech Lead

Question 17How does Kafka choose a Partition?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 18What is a Message Key?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 19How does ordering work?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 20Does Kafka guarantee global ordering?

Mid-levelSeniorTech Lead

Question 21What is a Consumer?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 22What is a Consumer Group?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 23What happens when there are more consumers than Partitions?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 24What happens when there are more Partitions than consumers?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 25What is Rebalance?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 26What happens when a Consumer goes down?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 27What is Offset?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 28What is Commit?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 29What's the difference between Auto Commit and Manual Commit?

SeniorTech Lead

Question 30What is Retention Period?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 31What is Replay?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 32How does Kafka manage to reread consumed messages?

Question 33What's the difference between Replay and SQS DLQ Redrive?

SeniorTech Lead

Question 34What is Retry?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 35What is DLQ or Dead Letter Topic?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 36Does Kafka have native DLQ?

SeniorTech Lead

Question 37What is a Poison Pill?

SeniorTech Lead

Question 38What is At Most Once?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 39What is At Least Once?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 40What is Exactly Once?

SeniorTech Lead

Question 41What is Idempotency?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 42How would you avoid duplicate processing?

SeniorTech Lead

Question 43What is Replication Factor?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 44What's the difference between Partition and Replication Factor?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 45What are Leader and Follower?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 46What happens when the Leader goes down?

SeniorTech Lead

Question 47What is Consumer Lag?

Mid-levelSenior

Question 48How would you monitor Kafka?

SeniorTech Lead

Question 49Tell me about a real project using Kafka.

SeniorTech Lead

Question 50What errors or challenges have you faced with Kafka?

SeniorTech Lead