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

For a controlled shutdown of a Kafka broker to succeed, it is crucial for all partitions to have replicas. This ensures that the data stored in the partitions is not lost during the shutdown process. When a broker with partitions that have replicas is shut down, the leadership for those partitions can be seamlessly transferred to the replicas on other brokers. This ensures that there is no downtime or data loss for the consumers that depend on that data.

The concept of having replicas is vital in Kafka's architecture as it guarantees fault tolerance and high availability. If a broker is shut down while its partitions lack replicas, those partitions would become unavailable, which could lead to potential data loss and infrastructural instability until the broker is brought back online.

The other conditions, while they may relate to the state of the Kafka environment during a shutdown, do not directly contribute to the successful controlled shutdown as critically as having replicas does. For instance, having all partitions empty is not a requirement for shutdown, nor are all consumers needing to be offline, as Kafka is built to handle active consumers while managing broker states. Additionally, message acknowledgment is not a strict requirement for shutting down; messages can still be processed in the background while a broker is being taken offline. Thus, ensuring all partitions have replicas is