Confluent Certified Developer for Apache Kafka¶

Exam Overview¶

The Confluent Certified Developer for Apache Kafka exam validates the ability to develop applications using Apache Kafka and the Confluent Platform. This certification demonstrates proficiency in building event-driven architectures, implementing streaming data pipelines, and working with the Kafka ecosystem including Kafka Streams, ksqlDB, and Schema Registry.

Exam Details: - Exam Code: Confluent Certified Developer - Duration: 90 minutes - Number of Questions: 60 multiple-choice questions - Passing Score: 70% - Cost: $150 USD - Delivery: Online proctored - Validity: 2 years - Prerequisites: None (hands-on Kafka development experience recommended)

Exam Domains¶

Domain 1: Application Design (15%)¶

• Designing event-driven architectures with Kafka
• Choosing between different messaging models (publish/subscribe vs point-to-point)
• Data modeling for Kafka topics
• Partitioning strategies and key design
• Topic naming conventions and organization

Key Concepts: - Event sourcing and CQRS patterns - Exactly-once semantics (EOS) - Idempotent producers - Transactional messaging

Domain 2: Development (30%)¶

• Producer API configuration and best practices
• Consumer API and consumer group management
• Offset management and commit strategies
• Error handling and retry patterns
• Serialization and deserialization

Key APIs: - KafkaProducer (send, flush, partitioner) - KafkaConsumer (subscribe, poll, commit) - AdminClient (topic management) - Serializers/Deserializers (String, Avro, JSON, Protobuf)

Domain 3: Kafka Streams (15%)¶

• Stream processing topology design
• KStream and KTable abstractions
• Stateful and stateless transformations
• Windowing operations (tumbling, hopping, sliding, session)
• Interactive queries

Key Concepts: - Stream-table duality - GlobalKTable for enrichment - State stores (RocksDB) - Exactly-once stream processing

Domain 4: ksqlDB (10%)¶

• Creating streams and tables
• Push and pull queries
• Materialized views
• User-defined functions
• Persistent queries

Key Concepts: - Stream-stream joins - Stream-table joins - Aggregations and windowed aggregations - ksqlDB REST API

Domain 5: Kafka Connect (15%)¶

• Source and sink connectors
• Single Message Transforms (SMTs)
• Converter configuration
• Dead letter queues
• Connector lifecycle management

Key Concepts: - Standalone vs distributed mode - Worker configuration - Task parallelism - Connect REST API

Domain 6: Schema Registry (15%)¶

• Schema evolution and compatibility modes
• Avro, Protobuf, and JSON Schema support
• Subject naming strategies
• Schema references
• Integration with producers and consumers

Key Concepts: - Forward, backward, and full compatibility - Schema ID and subject versioning - Content types and serialization formats - Schema Registry REST API

Study Materials¶

Official Resources¶

• 📖 Apache Kafka Documentation - Complete Kafka reference documentation
• 📖 Confluent Documentation - Confluent Platform and Cloud documentation
• 📖 Confluent Developer - Tutorials, courses, and developer resources
• 📖 Kafka Streams Documentation - Stream processing API guide

Study Guide Files¶

Notes Index¶