CCDAK Exam Dumps - Confluent Certified Developer for Apache Kafka Certification Examination

According to the Apache Kafka producer documentation, serialization is configured independently for message keys and values. The key and value can use different serializers depending on their data types.

In this scenario, the message key is a string, so the producer must be configured with org.apache.kafka.common.serialization.StringSerializer for the key. The value contains JSON, so a suitable JSON serializer must be configured for the value, such as a custom JSON serializer, a library-based serializer, or a byte-array serializer after converting the JSON to bytes.

Option B correctly reflects this separation by specifying a string serializer for the key and a JSON serializer for the value. Kafka does not automatically infer serializers, and setting a serializer to null is invalid. Additionally, there is no built-in “JSON” serializer for keys, making Option D incorrect.

Therefore, the correct approach—fully aligned with Kafka’s producer configuration model—is to explicitly configure a StringSerializer for the key and a JSON-capable serializer for the value.

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To increase consumer throughput, one effective strategy is to increase the amount of data fetched in each poll by raising fetch.max.bytes or max.partition.fetch.bytes. This allows each poll to retrieve more records per request, improving processing efficiency.

From Kafka Consumer Config Docs:

“Increasing fetch size allows consumers to retrieve larger batches of messages, improving throughput and reducing request overhead.”

Removing consumers (A) may reduce parallelism.

Manual commit (C) adds complexity, not throughput.

Decreasing session timeout (D) risks unnecessary rebalances.

In Kafka Streams, the number of stream tasks = number of input partitions × num.stream.threads × number of instances, but only as many as the number of partitions can actively consume at once.

However, in this case, Kafka Streams assigns one task per partition, and because there are 5 partitions and 15 threads (3 instances × 5 threads), 15 tasks are created, and all 15 can be active depending on processing topology.

From Kafka Streams Developer Guide:

"Kafka Streams creates one task per input partition. If you increase the number of stream threads, it runs multiple tasks in parallel within a single instance."

So, 15 stream tasks will be created and 15 will be actively consuming.

As documented in the official Apache Kafka Connect framework documentation, Kafka Connect workers form a logical cluster by using a Kafka consumer group. The configuration property that identifies this cluster is group.id.

All Kafka Connect workers configured with the same group.id automatically join the same Connect cluster. Kafka’s group coordination protocol is then used to distribute connector and task configurations among the workers, providing fault tolerance, scalability, and automatic rebalancing.

Option A (cluster.id) is a Kafka internal identifier used by brokers and is not configurable for Kafka Connect workers. Option B (worker.id) does not exist as a valid Kafka Connect configuration. Option D (connector.id) identifies individual connectors within a Connect cluster, not the worker cluster itself.

Therefore, the group.id property is the correct and officially documented configuration that determines which Kafka Connect cluster a worker belongs to.

RetriableException is a subclass of KafkaException, indicating transient issues that might succeed if retried. Examples include:

LeaderNotAvailableException: Happens when metadata is not yet propagated or leader election is in progress.

NotEnoughReplicasException: Happens when the number of in-sync replicas is insufficient. This can be transient if replicas come back online.

From the Apache Kafka Java Client documentation:

"These exceptions (like LeaderNotAvailableException, NotEnoughReplicasException) are transient and the client will retry them automatically depending on retry configuration."

RecordTooLargeException and AuthorizationException are non-retriable as they indicate client-side or permission errors.