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

When unclean leader election is disabled, the behavior of the partition during a leader election scenario is impacted significantly. In this case, if the current leader fails and there are no in-sync replicas available to take over, the partition will remain unavailable. This is because disabling unclean leader election prevents any out-of-sync replicas from being elected as the new leader, ensuring that only replicas that are fully caught up with the latest data are considered for leadership.

As a result, until a broker that is either the current leader or one of the in-sync replicas comes back online, the partition cannot serve any read or write requests. This ensures data consistency but at the cost of availability, as users may experience downtime for that partition until a suitable leader is found. Thus, maintaining data integrity takes precedence, demonstrating the trade-off between consistency and availability in distributed systems like Kafka.