CCAAK FAQ — Confluent Kafka Administrator Exam Questions Answered

What is CCAAK?

CCAAK is the Confluent Certified Administrator for Apache Kafka certification. It validates Kafka administration skills: cluster configuration, topic management, security, monitoring, and troubleshooting.

Is this an operations/SRE-style exam?

Yes. It rewards people who can keep Kafka healthy and safe: interpret cluster states, avoid risky changes, and choose configurations that match requirements.

What background helps the most?

• Running Kafka in any environment (self-managed, Kubernetes, or managed platforms).
• Comfort with CLI tools and configuration files.
• Experience diagnosing lag, timeouts, and replication health issues.

How long should I study?

Most candidates land between 30 and 120 hours, depending on how much Kafka administration you’ve already done. See the Study Plan for a 30/60/90-day structure.

What are the most common weak spots?

• Misunderstanding ISR and how acks + min.insync.replicas interact.
• Confusing partitions vs replication vs consumer parallelism.
• Listener configuration (advertised.listeners) and security protocol mismatches.
• Picking the wrong “next step” during incidents (e.g., risky unclean leader election).

Do I need to memorize every broker config?

No, but you should recognize the high-yield configs (listeners, log dirs, retention/compaction, min ISR, leader election, security). The Cheatsheet is organized around those.

What’s the best way to practice?

Use the Syllabus as a checklist and drill one section at a time in Practice. Keep a miss log and re-drill weak areas within 24–48 hours.