CCDAK Exam Dumps : Confluent Certified Developer for Apache Kafka Certification Examination

Kafka Connect can run in standalone mode or distributed mode. For simple tasks like reading logs from a file on a single host, standalone mode is recommended.

From Kafka Connect User Guide:

“Standalone mode is useful when running connectors on a single machine (e.g., for development or simple deployments like log collection from a local file).”

Distributed mode is preferred for scalability and fault tolerance but overkill for this use case.

The Apache Kafka Streams documentation clearly distinguishes between the Kafka Streams DSL and the Processor API. While the DSL is designed for common stream processing operations such as filtering, mapping, joining, and aggregations, it does not support fully custom processing logic.

For use cases that require custom transformations, fine-grained control over record processing, access to headers, timestamps, state stores, and punctuation, Kafka Streams provides the Processor API. This API allows developers to implement custom Processor, Transformer, or ValueTransformer classes and explicitly define the processing topology.

Option A (TopologyTestDriver) is a testing utility, not a development API. Option C (DSL) is higher-level and not suitable for advanced custom logic. Option D does not exist in Kafka.

Therefore, the correct and officially supported approach for defining custom processors in Kafka Streams is to use the Processor API.

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In Kafka Streams, the number of stream tasks = number of input partitions × num.stream.threads × number of instances, but only as many as the number of partitions can actively consume at once.

However, in this case, Kafka Streams assigns one task per partition, and because there are 5 partitions and 15 threads (3 instances × 5 threads), 15 tasks are created, and all 15 can be active depending on processing topology.

From Kafka Streams Developer Guide:

"Kafka Streams creates one task per input partition. If you increase the number of stream threads, it runs multiple tasks in parallel within a single instance."

So, 15 stream tasks will be created and 15 will be actively consuming.