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

The maximum number of partitions a Kafka topic can have is not a fixed number; rather, it varies based on various factors including broker performance, system resources, and configuration settings. Kafka allows you to specify the number of partitions when creating a topic, and while there's no hard limit imposed by Kafka itself, practical limitations arise from the capacity of the brokers to manage and replicate data effectively.

Factors that influence the maximum number of partitions include:

1. **Broker Performance**: Each partition incurs overhead in terms of memory, disk, and CPU usage. The performance of the Kafka brokers, including the hardware they are running on, will affect how many partitions can be handled efficiently.

2. **Replication Factor**: If a topic has a high replication factor (i.e., the number of copies of the data stored), this can limit the number of partitions that can be effectively managed, because replication will consume additional resources.

3. **Consumer Configuration**: The number of consumers that can effectively read messages from the partitions also affects the scalability of the number of partitions. More partitions allow for greater parallelism, but each partition can only be read by a single consumer in a consumer group at a time.

In summary, while there are considerations and dimensions that influence the