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Hectal
Phase 17Advanced18 of 18 in Apache Kafka

Interview Revision

The full Kafka question bank from beginner to staff with model answers, the 40 hands-on builds, study plans by experience level, and the final readiness checklist.

Use this phase to revise: answer out loud before revealing each model answer, and follow the links in earlier phases for depth.

Answer every design question with the chain: requirement → event characteristics → throughput → latency → durability → ordering → key → partitions → replication → producer semantics → consumer semantics → delivery guarantee → retry/DLT → schema → failure handling → observability → capacity → DR → trade-offs.

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5 topics ~29 min 2 code blocks & diagrams
Start with the first topic
1
17.1

Beginner Questions (1–15)

Fifteen fundamentals: what Kafka is and why, Kafka vs RabbitMQ and Redis, topics, partitions, offsets, brokers, consumer groups, why partitions exist, replication, ISR, producers, consumers and retention.

5 min

2
17.2

Intermediate Questions (16–35)

Twenty mechanism questions: ordering, consumer crashes, lag, rebalancing, acks=all, min.insync.replicas, idempotence, delivery semantics, exactly-once and transactions, compaction and tombstones, schemas and Schema Registry, Connect, Streams, KStream vs KTable, repartitioning, DLTs and retries.

5 min

3
17.3

Advanced Design Questions (36–50)

Fifteen design and deep-explanation questions: rate-limited event systems, payment pipelines, CDC platforms, multi-region clusters, analytics pipelines, exactly-once semantics, outbox, saga, event sourcing, CQRS, state stores, rebalancing, hot partitions, key selection and capacity planning.

5 min

4
17.4

Senior and Staff Questions (51–65)

Fifteen failure-driven questions: producer timeouts after acceptance, crashes before commit, growing lag, a partition with half the traffic, 15-minute batches, 95% full disks, shrinking ISR, broker death during leadership, AZ survival, global ordering, per-customer ordering, a 30% customer, exactly-once payments, atomic DB + Kafka writes, and ZooKeeper-to-KRaft migration.

5 min

5
17.5

40 Hands-On Builds, Study Plans, and the Readiness Checklist

Build the 40 projects in five levels, follow the plan for your experience, and use the checklist before claiming "I know Kafka". Each build should include tests for crashes, duplicates and rebalances, which become your interview stories.

9 min 1 diagram 1 code practice