Kafka Interview Questions: 26 Real Production Problems
Twenty-six Kafka problems from real systems, from partitions and keys to exactly-once, rebalancing and multi-region. Pick a fix, then see the better design.
More on the Kafka course
- Kafka Simulator: Producers, Partitions and Consumer Groups
- How Uber, Netflix and Zomato Use Kafka: Real Architectures
- Kafka vs a Message Queue: Why Events Stay After Reading
- Kafka Topics vs Partitions and Message Keys Explained
- Kafka Producer Batching: Async Send, linger.ms, batch.size
- Event-Driven Architecture with Kafka: Drop Sync Calls
- Kafka Fan-Out: One Event, Many Consumer Groups
- Transactional Outbox Pattern with Kafka Explained
- Kafka acks=all and min.insync.replicas Explained
- Idempotent Kafka Consumers: Handle Duplicate Events
- Kafka Outbox Duplicates: Dedupe by Event ID, Not Offset
- Kafka Message Ordering: Global vs Per-Key Order
- Kafka Hot Partition: Choosing the Right Message Key
- Kafka Consumer Lag: More Consumers Than Partitions
- Kafka Retry and Dead Letter Queue (DLQ) Pattern
- Kafka Log Compaction Explained: Latest Value per Key
- Event Sourcing with Kafka: Keep Every Change
- Kafka Schema Evolution and Schema Registry Explained
- Kafka Exactly-Once Semantics: Where It Ends
- Kafka Share Groups (Queues for Kafka) Explained
- Kafka Consumer Group Rebalancing Without Pauses
- Kafka Rack Awareness: Replicas Across Zones
- Kafka max.poll.interval.ms: Slow Consumers Kicked Out
- Kafka Monitoring: Alert on Lag Time, Not Message Count
- Kafka Quotas: Stop a Replay Hurting Live Traffic
- Kafka Security: TLS, SASL and ACLs Explained
- Kafka Tiered Storage Explained
- Kafka Multi-Region and Disaster Recovery
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