CCDAK FAQ — Confluent Kafka Developer Exam Questions Answered

What is CCDAK?

CCDAK is the Confluent Certified Developer for Apache Kafka certification. It validates practical knowledge of Kafka development: producers, consumers, consumer groups, offsets, and delivery semantics.

Do I need to be a Kafka administrator first?

No. CCDAK is developer-focused. You should understand how topics/partitions and replication relate to durability and throughput, but you’re not expected to operate clusters at an admin depth.

What background helps the most?

• Comfort writing code (Java is common in Kafka ecosystems, but the concepts transfer).
• Basic networking/distributed systems intuition (latency, retries, failure modes).
• Hands-on time sending/consuming records and observing consumer group behavior.

How long should I study?

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

What are the most common weak spots?

• Confusing partitions vs topics and misunderstanding ordering guarantees.
• Unclear offset commit semantics (auto vs manual; commit timing).
• Rebalance behavior and consumer liveness settings (max.poll.interval.ms, timeouts).
• Reliable producer configuration (acks/retries/idempotence) and duplicate handling.

Do I need to memorize every config name?

You don’t need to memorize every setting, but you should recognize the high-yield ones and what they trade off. The Cheatsheet is organized around those.

What’s the best practice approach?

Start with the Syllabus and turn each section into drills in Practice. Track misses, then re-drill the same topic within 24–48 hours.

Quick glossary (mini)

• Ordering: guaranteed only within a partition
• Consumer group: parallel readers of a topic (one consumer per partition)
• Offset: the consumer’s position in a partition log
• At-least-once: safest default; duplicates possible → make processing idempotent