Confluent CCAAK: Confluent Certified Administrator for Apache Kafka (CCAAK)

Last checked November 10, 2026 against the official Confluent exam page.

1. Question 1Configure Kafka clusters

   A team runs a three-broker cluster and creates an orders topic with replication factor 3. Producers use acks=all. The team wants writes to keep succeeding when one broker is down, but producers should receive errors instead of acknowledgements when only one replica remains in sync. Which topic-level setting should they configure?

   1. Amin.insync.replicas set to 2
   2. Bunclean.leader.election.enable set to true
   3. Ccleanup.policy set to compact
   4. Dretention.ms set to a longer period
   Show answer and explanationHide answer

   Correct answer: A

   With acks=all, min.insync.replicas=2 means a write needs two in-sync replicas. With one broker down two remain and writes succeed; with two down, producers get NotEnoughReplicas errors. The other settings govern leader eligibility, compaction and age-based retention, not the acknowledgement rule.

2. Question 2Deploy Kafka clusters

   A platform team is building a KRaft cluster for a payments workload. They want the metadata quorum to keep working if any one controller node fails. How many controller nodes should they run?

   1. AThree controller nodes
   2. BTwo controller nodes across two data centers
   3. CFour controller nodes
   4. DOne controller node
   Show answer and explanationHide answer

   Correct answer: A

   A KRaft quorum needs a majority of voters, so three controllers can lose one node and still elect a leader. Two controllers cannot survive any failure and one has no redundancy. Four controllers also tolerate only one failure, so three is the usual minimum for this goal.

3. Question 3Monitor Kafka clusters

   The UnderReplicatedPartitions metric on a broker stays at a steady non-zero value after a network blip. Every partition still has a leader. What is the most likely meaning?

   1. AThe controller has lost its leadership role
   2. BProducers have disabled idempotence
   3. CConsumer groups have been deleted and their offsets reset
   4. DSome follower replicas have fallen out of the ISR
   Show answer and explanationHide answer

   Correct answer: D

   UnderReplicatedPartitions counts partitions where some replicas are missing from the in-sync set, so a follower is lagging or unreachable even though the partition still has a leader. Controller leadership, idempotence settings and consumer group deletion do not affect this replication metric.

4. Question 4Support Kafka clusters

   Producers with acks=all receive NotEnoughReplicas errors for a topic with replication factor 3 and min.insync.replicas set to 2. Two of the three brokers hosting some of its partitions stopped responding. What is happening?

   1. AThe topic has exceeded its retention.bytes limit
   2. BThe producer batch.size is too large for the brokers
   3. CThe consumers have stopped committing offsets for the whole group
   4. DThe ISR for those partitions has fallen below two members
   Show answer and explanationHide answer

   Correct answer: D

   With acks=all the leader rejects writes when the in-sync set has fewer members than min.insync.replicas. Losing two of three replicas leaves one in-sync member for the affected partitions, so NotEnoughReplicas is returned. Retention limits, consumer commits and batch sizes do not produce this error.

5. Question 5Configure Kafka clusters

   Which broker setting decides whether a replica that is not fully caught up with the partition leader may be elected leader, accepting the risk of losing acknowledged messages?

   1. Aauto.create.topics.enable
   2. Blog.cleaner.enable
   3. Cunclean.leader.election.enable
   4. Ddefault.replication.factor for new topics
   Show answer and explanationHide answer

   Correct answer: C

   unclean.leader.election.enable allows an out-of-sync replica to become leader when no in-sync replica is available, which can discard messages the old leader had acknowledged. It is disabled by default to protect durability. The other settings control topic auto-creation, the log cleaner and default replica counts.