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

Setting the offset replica factor is the key to enhancing the high availability of an offset topic in Kafka. The replica factor determines how many copies of each partition are maintained across different brokers in a Kafka cluster. By increasing the replica factor, you ensure that if one broker fails, there will still be an available copy of the data on another broker. This redundancy makes it possible for the system to continue to operate smoothly, maintaining access to offsets without loss of data or service interruptions.

While increasing the number of partitions can improve parallelism and potentially increase throughput, it does not inherently enhance availability regarding the data's resilience against broker failures. Reducing the message retention period relates more to how long messages are kept before being deleted, which does not affect high availability. Enabling message compression optimizes storage and network usage but does not contribute to the availability of the offsets themselves. Thus, setting an appropriate replica factor directly addresses the need for fault tolerance and continuity of service in case of broker outages.