Apache Kafka Practice Exam 2025 – The Complete All-in-One Guide for Exam Success!

A higher replication factor in Kafka primarily enhances availability and reliability. Replication in Kafka means that each message sent to a topic is stored across multiple brokers, allowing the system to tolerate broker failures. When the replication factor is increased, each piece of data is replicated more times, which ensures that if one or more brokers go down, the data can still be retrieved from the remaining brokers. This redundancy minimizes the risk of data loss and ensures that the system continues to function smoothly, even in the face of potential hardware or network failures.

Additionally, this increased level of redundancy contributes to the overall reliability of the Kafka cluster, as it can more effectively handle failures without impacting the availability of the data for consumers. Thus, the benefits of having a higher replication factor are most evident in scenarios where consistent access to data and system robustness are critical.