How to Prepare for CCDAK — Confluent Certified Developer for Apache Kafka?

On April 13th, 2021, at 12:30PM, i have successfully completed CCDAK exam :-) . The exam contains 60 questions and the duration was 90 minutes. The duration will be sufficient to complete the exam. Generally it takes 60 minutes to complete the exam.

Last time i have shared my learnings on AWS Solution Architect Professional and i had received a very good feedback. So I felt to share my learnings on CCDAK exam too.

CCDAK exam checks your understanding on Kafka, Confluent, kafka architecture and various syntax to create the topics etc. The preparation requires 45–60 hours of time or 30 days (1–2 hours per day). Once we are done with the preparation, the practice tests will be really helpful. I have purchased the practice tests from udemy by Stephane Maarek(https://www.udemy.com/share/1021QoCUIedVpTQH0=/). This practice exams contain three mock tests which covered the length and breadth of the entire topics.

Below are the topics that would be helpful during the preparation:

1. Kafka architecture
2. understanding on Cluster, Rack, Broker, Topic, Partition, Segment
3. In the above topics, we need to remember the default values that will be set
4. Log retention and cleanup policies
5. Topic replication
6. Producer, retriable and non-retriable errors
7. Producer acknowledgement (acks=0, acks=1 and acks=all). The understanding of this topic is MANDATORY and we can expect atleast three questions on this topic
8. ISRs — in-sync replicas. Another topic that is MANDATORY
9. Producer with compression and batching
10. Message keys and default size. expect atleast two questions on message keys
11. Consumer, Consumer groups and consumer offset
12. Consumer heartbeat and session timeout
13. kafka connect — sink and source
14. zookeeper topology
15. kafka CLI commands
16. kafka streams — stateless and stateful operators. Expect three questions on this topic
17. Window types (Tumbling, Hopping etc). minimum of two questions
18. Stream DSL — KStream Vs KTable Vs GlobalKTable. minimum of two questions
19. Join operands
20. Avro schema registry — primitive vs complex
21. Schema compatibility types

Please reach out to me in case if you need additional information. My email id is : kiran.mvv@gmail.com