CCAAK study guide
CCAAK · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
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. It sits alongside Confluent's developer and cloud operator certifications rather than replacing them, so it is the administration-focused option for people whose day-to-day work is cluster operations rather than application code. The exam is delivered in English as a 90-minute proctored test taken remotely, and question types vary, including multiple-choice, matching, and list order. The CCAAK study guide has 4 sections and about 1,783 words.
01Configure Apache Kafka Clusters
Domain 1, Configure Apache Kafka clusters , tests whether you can translate workload requirements into broker, topic and client settings, and whether you know which settings are static, which are dynamic, and where each one applies. server.properties is read at broker startup.
464 words, about 2 min02Deploy Apache Kafka Clusters
Domain 2, Deploy Apache Kafka clusters , tests capacity planning, metadata-mode selection, listener configuration and the mechanics of rolling deployment and expansion. The exam expects exact commands and ordering, not general installation advice.
469 words, about 2 min03Monitor Apache Kafka Clusters
Domain 3, Monitor Apache Kafka clusters , tests whether you can pick the metrics that actually predict incidents, interpret them correctly, and distinguish broker problems from client or data-distribution problems. The exam favors JMX metric names and commands over generic dashboards.
454 words, about 2 min04Support Apache Kafka Clusters
Domain 4, Support Apache Kafka clusters , tests operational triage and lifecycle work: diagnosing incidents in the right order, reassigning and decommissioning, applying quotas and security, and recovering safely without silently losing data. Cluster level: offline partitions, active controller count, under-replication, disk full.
396 words, about 2 min