🔥 1. Kafka Internals (Deep Dive)

Core Topics

✅ Kafka Architecture (Brokers, Partitions, Topics, Zookeeper)

✅ Leader-Follower Replication (ISR, AR, Leader Election)

✅ Kafka Log Segments & Retention Policy

✅ Message Storage & Compaction

✅ Kafka Exactly-Once Semantics (EOS)

Practice Questions

1️⃣ How does Kafka ensure fault tolerance?

2️⃣ What happens internally when a producer sends a message?

3️⃣ Explain Kafka’s replication mechanism and leader election.

4️⃣ How does Kafka handle backpressure?

5️⃣ What happens if a Kafka broker crashes?

6️⃣ How does Kafka achieve exactly-once processing?

Hands-On Practice

✔ Inspect Kafka logs and analyze segment files.

✔ Simulate a broker failure and observe leader election.

✔ Configure Kafka retention policy and observe log compaction.