Kafka is complicated, until you go through these resources.
Free Kafka resources
- Apache Kafka crash course with Spring Boot 3.0.x, Java Techie
- Apache Kafka with Spring Boot crash course, Daily Code Buffer
- All about Kafka, Learning Tutorial
- Kafka tutorial, Intellipaat
- Kafka crash course, Hussein Nasser
How Kafka is implemented at tech giants
- LinkedIn’s Kafka journey
- Pinterest’s Kafka at scale
- Why Trello chose Kafka
- Salesforce’s Kafka-inspired architecture
- NYT’s publishing with Kafka
- Yelp’s billions of messages
- Criteo’s Kafka upgrade
- Shopify’s Kafka on Kubernetes
- Yelp’s zero-downtime ZooKeeper migration
- Uber’s Kafka reprocessing
- Dropbox’s Kafka throughput limits
- Walmart’s cost orchestration
- PayPal’s Kafka scaling
Kafka interview questions
Basic
- What is Apache Kafka, and what are its core components?
- Explain the difference between a topic, partition, and segment.
- How does Kafka ensure message ordering?
- What is a consumer group in Kafka?
Intermediate
- How does Kafka achieve fault tolerance?
- Explain Kafka’s partitioning strategy and how it impacts performance.
- Describe Kafka’s consumer offset management.
Advanced
- Explain the concept of exactly-once semantics (EOS) in Kafka.
- How would you monitor and optimize Kafka performance in a production environment?
- How would you design a Kafka-based system to guarantee data consistency in the event of node failures?