What is Kafka? Kafka is a framework implementation of a software bus using stream-processing. It is an open-source software platform developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala and Java.
1. Why Are You Interested In This Role?
“To start with, I am a big fan of framework implementation of software and that is what I do most of my time. I must say that I want to be part of the team that is helping your company get the best information technology websites that will aid your company to achieve its goals. And, I am a person who likes learning from others as well. Since I am still young and energetic, I want to improve my skills too by learning and gaining more experience in this field as well. I will be happy to offer my skills to you and learn from you as well. In fact, success comes from finding win-win solutions!”
2. What Are The Key Components Of Kafka?
- Topic – This is the collection of messages
- Producer –This issues communications and publishes messages to a Kafka topic
- Brokers – Manages the storage of messages.
3. What Are The Main Functions Of Kafka?
“Kafka provides three main functions to its users:
- Publish and subscribe to streams of records
- Effectively store streams of records in the order in which records were generated
- Process streams of records in real time
Kafka is primarily used to build real-time streaming data pipelines and applications that adapt to the data streams. It combines messaging, storage, and stream processing to allow storage and analysis of both historical and real-time data.”
4. What Major Challenges Did You Have In Your Previous Role, And How Did You Manage Them?
“In this industry, one of the biggest problems I have faced is that the database can be cluttered with a lot of data that you can do without. Sometimes I would just install Kafka and my database would look well-organized until I start adding data and information. The system would create a metadata table alongside a basic table. Sometimes, as more data lands in my database, its structure would get out of control because of those additional tables. Querying the data with SQL would become extremely difficult due to a great number of interrelations. I would use the built-in Kafka methods to get a more straightforward table structure. However, if the amount of data is huge, this may cause the site to load at a very slow pace which is very nagging. To curb this, I learned that it is very important to first do a thorough review of database organization and suggest the best ways to keep it on point.”
5. What Are The Five Main API’s Of Apache Kafka?
“Apache Kafka has five main API’s namely;
- Producer API – Permits an application to publish streams of records.
- Consumer API – Permits an application to subscribe to topics and processes streams of records.
- Connector API – Executes the reusable producer and consumer APIs that can link the topics to the existing applications.
- Streams API – This API converts the input streams to output and produces the result.
- Admin API – used to manage Kafka topics, brokers and other Kafka objects.”
6. Describe Briefly About Your Experience
“After gaining a Bachelor’s degree in computer science, I was recruited as an intern in an online market company. After working as an intern for a year, I went back to school and earned a master’s degree in computer science. I was permanently employed in the company I worked for as an intern again. This time, I was the Kafka in the organization. I would help in creating, managing, and safeguarding websites for this company. This is a duty I did for four years and that gives me a score of five working experiences in this field. I hope I will get a chance to use my experience to better your company.”
7. What Kind Of Strategies And Mindset Are Required For This Role?
“A Kafka should mainly focus on giving quality to their clients. Getting them updated and the latest software that would work perfectly is what many clients are looking for in Kafkas. Focusing on quality software and programs entails using knowledge and creativity to come up with the best. Without any doubt, clients will look for quality, creativity, confidence, professional portfolio, and timeliness. Also, a Kafka should focus detail on the software and commands to see what mistakes they might have made during the entire process and how they should fix them.”
8. What Is The Biggest Challenge That You Foresee In This Role?
“As a Kafka, I have learned that the technology is advancing day by day and we should remain updated at all times. As technology develops, we need to update our software and websites. It’s always challenging to keep up to date. Every time you need to update something, it must cost you time, money, and effort. Although advancing technology is changing the world to a better world, there is a challenge in this industry and we need to coup up with it.”
9. What Is The Process Of Starting Kafka Server?
- “First, start a local instance of the zookeeper server ./bin/zookeeper-server-start.sh config/zookeeper.properties.
- Next, start a kafka broker ./bin/kafka-server-start.sh config/server.properties.
- Now, create the producer with all configuration defaults and use zookeeper based broker discovery.
- Start a consumer
- Write some code.”
10. What Is The Main Differences Between Kafka And Flume?
- Both, Apache Kafka and Flume systems provide reliable, scalable and high-performance for handling large volumes of data with ease. However, Kafka is a more general purpose system where multiple publishers and subscribers can share multiple topics. Contrarily, Flume is a special purpose tool for sending data into HDFS.
- Kafka can support data streams for multiple applications, whereas Flume is specific for Hadoop and big data analysis.
- Kafka can process and monitor data in distributed systems whereas Flume gathers data from distributed systems to land data on a centralized data store.
- When configured correctly, both Apache Kafka and Flume are highly reliable with zero data loss guarantees. Kafka replicates data in the cluster, whereas Flume does not replicate events. Hence, when a Flume agent crashes, access to those events in the channel is lost till the disk is recovered, on the other hand, Kafka makes data available even in case of single point failure.
- Kafka supports large sets of publishers and subscribers and multiple applications. On the other hand, Flume supports a large set of source and destination types to land data on Hadoop.”
11. What Is The Role Of The Zookeeper In Kafka?
“Kafka uses Zookeeper to manage service discovery for Kafka Brokers that form the cluster. Zookeeper sends changes of the topology to Kafka, so each node in the cluster knows when a new broker joined, a Broker died, a topic was removed or a topic was added, etc.”
12. What Ensures Load Balancing Of The Server In Kafka?
“Kafka producers (Kafka clients running in your web servers in your case) write to a single leader, this provides a means of load balancing production so that each writer can be serviced by a separate broker and machine. Producers do the load balancing selecting the target partition for each message.
13. Tell Us Four Benefits Of Using Kafka
- Kafka is highly scalable – Kafka is a distributed system, which is able to be scaled quickly and easily without incurring any downtime. Apache Kafka is able to handle many terabytes of data without incurring much at all in the way of overhead.
- Kafka is highly durable – Kafka persists the messages on the disks, which provides intra-cluster replication. This makes for a highly durable messaging system.
- Kafka is Highly Reliable – Kafka replicates data and is able to support multiple subscribers. Additionally, it automatically balances consumers in the event of failure. That means that it’s more reliable than similar messaging services available.
- Kafka offers high performance – Kafka delivers high throughput for both publishing and subscribing, utilizing disk structures that are capable of offering constant levels of performance, even when dealing with many terabytes of stored messages.
14. What Are Top Disadvantages Of Kafka
- Do not have complete set of monitoring tools: Apache Kafka does not contain a complete set of monitoring as well as managing tools. Thus, new startups or enterprises fear to work with Kafka.
- Message tweaking issues: The Kafka broker uses system calls to deliver messages to the consumer. In case, the message needs some tweaking, the performance of Kafka gets significantly reduced. So, it works well if the message does not need to change.
- Do not support wildcard topic selection: Apache Kafka does not support wildcard topic selection. Instead, it matches only the exact topic name. It is because selecting wildcard topics make it incapable to address certain use cases.
- Reduces Performance: Brokers and consumers reduce the performance of Kafka by compressing and decompressing the data flow. This not only affects its performance but also affects its throughput.
- Clumsy Behaviour: Apache Kafka most often behaves a bit clumsy when the number of queues increases in the Kafka Cluster.
- Lack some message paradigms: Certain message paradigms such as point-to-point queues, request/reply, etc. are missing in Kafka for some use cases.
15. What Are Kafka Tools?
Kafka Tool is a GUI application for managing and using Apache Kafka clusters. It provides an intuitive UI that allows one to quickly view objects within a Kafka cluster as well as the messages stored in the topics of the cluster
16. Is Kafka Devops Tool?
Kafka is a fault-tolerant, highly scalable, and used for log aggregation, stream processing, event sources, and commit logs.
17. What Is Kafka Zookeeper?
Kafka uses ZooKeeper to manage the cluster. ZooKeeper is used to coordinate the brokers/cluster topology. ZooKeeper is a consistent file system for configuration information.
18. Kafka Streams Provides Mechanisms That Equip You To Deal With The Three Broad Categories Of Errors. Name Them.
- Entry – usually related to deserialization and network
- Processing – a large realm of possibilities, often user-defined code or something happening in the Kafka Streams framework itself
- Exit – similar to entry errors, related to deserialization and network
19. How Does Kafka Work In A Nutshell?
Kafka is a distributed system consisting of servers and clients that communicate via a high-performance TCP network protocol. It can be deployed on bare-metal hardware, virtual machines, and containers in on-premise as well as cloud environments.
Servers: Kafka is run as a cluster of one or more servers that can span multiple datacenters or cloud regions. Some of these servers form the storage layer, called the brokers. Other servers run Kafka Connect to continuously import and export data as event streams to integrate Kafka with your existing systems such as relational databases as well as other Kafka clusters. To let you implement mission-critical use cases, a Kafka cluster is highly scalable and fault-tolerant: if any of its servers fails, the other servers will take over their work to ensure continuous operations without any data loss.
20. How Does Kafka Work On Clients
“They allow you to write distributed applications and microservices that read, write, and process streams of events in parallel, at scale, and in a fault-tolerant manner even in the case of network problems or machine failures. Kafka ships with some such clients included, which are augmented by dozens of clients provided by the Kafka community: clients are available for Java and Scala including the higher-level Kafka Streams library, for Go, Python, C/C++, and many other programming languages as well as REST APIs.”
21. How Would You Build A Strong Team To Work With In Your Department?
“To have a great team to work with I would;
Start by setting my expectations of what is required to evaluate their capabilities
Hold performance reviews to pick the best
Maintain regular communication with all the employees to learn more about them through one on one engagement.”
22. What Is Your Biggest Fear In Your Career
“The biggest fear in my career would be having a team that will lead to poor results. I would consider this as a total failure and no one would want that. I am always focused on working with people who can bring productivity to their company. That would be my biggest fear in my career.”
23. What Should We Expect From You In The First Month?
“I am very assured that in my first year you are going to get the best strategies that I have been using earlier. I will start by testing how they work towards meeting the goals of your company and if all is well, I put them all into place.
24. What Kind Of Environment Do You Like Working In?
“As far as the nature of this job is concerned, I have spent so much time working in a super busy environment. I have adapted to this kind of environment, and now it’s my best. I would still be interested in working in a busy environment as before because it brings motivation and morale among the employees working together. No one would love to work in an environment where other employees are idling around while you are busy doing your job. It is better to work in an environment where you see everyone else around you is as busy as you are.
25. What Kind Of A Tool Is Kafka?
Apache Kafka is a framework implementation of a software bus using stream-processing.
Conclusion
Kafka is a challenging career but you must show your interviewer that you are capable of working them out as soon as you can. Answer the questions with confidence, straight to the point, and you will pass the interview. All the best.
