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

Utilizing the rack awareness property in Kafka is an effective way to protect replicas against failure. Kafka's rack awareness feature allows the system to understand the physical topology of the cluster, particularly where brokers are located in relation to racks and data centers. By configuring replication to distribute replicas across different racks or data centers within a cluster, you can minimize the risk of losing all replicas of a partition due to a single point of failure, such as an entire rack or data center going down.

This approach enhances fault tolerance because if one rack fails, the other racks that contain replicas for the same partition remain operational. As a result, the Kafka cluster can still serve requests and provide message delivery, ensuring higher availability and reliability of the message stream.

In contrast, placing all replicas in the same rack or data center (options referring to concentration of resources) would significantly increase the risk of total data loss if that single location experiences an outage. Keeping replicas in close geographical proximity would also fail to provide the necessary safeguarding against site-specific failures. This is where rack awareness plays a crucial role in maintaining the resilience of a Kafka cluster.