CCAAK case studies
CCAAK · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The Confluent Certified Administrator for Apache Kafka® (CCAAK) is a vendor-issued certification aimed at professionals who manage and maintain Kafka cluster environments. According to Confluent, the credential validates the key skills required to configure, deploy, monitor, and support Apache Kafka® clusters, with the stated goal of ensuring reliable performance and operational excellence. The CCAAK case studies are 5 cases and about 3,317 words.
1Compacted Topic Reaches 92% Disk While Consumers See Duplicate Keys
A 9-broker Kafka 3.6 cluster hosts a user-profiles topic with 24 partitions, replication factor 3, and cleanup.policy=compact . Producers emit about 4,000 keyed updates per second for roughly 180 million user IDs, averaging 1 KB per record.
571 words, about 3 min2AZ Outage Takes 14 Topics Offline After Rack Configuration Is Left Empty
An operations team deploys a new Kafka 3.7 cluster with six brokers, two in each of three availability zones, and sets default.replication.factor=3 , min.insync.replicas=2 , and producer acks=all . The deployment template leaves broker.rack unset because a variable resolves to an empty string.
669 words, about 3 min3Lag Rises While the Consumer Group Rebalances Every Few Minutes
A 16-partition payments-events topic is consumed by the ledger-writer group with eight consumers. For 45 minutes, total consumer lag rises by about 40,000 messages per minute.
680 words, about 3 min4Read-Only Log Directory Leaves 36 Partitions Offline Without a Broker Crash
A 12-broker Kafka 3.6 cluster uses four log directories per broker, each on its own SAN LUN. Broker 7's /data/kafka/3 LUN is remounted read-only after a SAN path failure, but the broker process remains up and continues heartbeating.
718 words, about 4 min5Rolling Upgrade Stalls When the First Broker Is Set to the New Protocol Too Early
An 8-broker ZooKeeper-based Kafka 3.4 cluster is being upgraded to 3.7. The runbook says to replace binaries broker by broker and then perform a second rolling restart to finalize the protocol version.
679 words, about 3 min