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

When a Kafka broker shuts down gracefully, it syncs all logs to disk, which is critical for data integrity and consistency. This process ensures that any messages that have been produced but not yet written to the log files are successfully persisted before the broker completely stops. By doing so, Kafka maintains durability and reliability, allowing for recovery and continuation of operations after a restart without the loss of data.

The other options do not accurately describe what happens during a graceful shutdown. There is no deletion of messages; instead, the focus is on preserving the existing data. Consumers are not permanently stopped, as they can reconnect to other brokers in the cluster without losing their position or the ability to consume messages from different partitions. Resetting offsets also does not occur during this process; offsets are managed independently by consumers and reflect their progress in consumption rather than the broker's operational state.