What the blueprint includes
According to the blueprint, questions can cover Apache Kafka itself, other Apache projects you'd find in a production Kafka setup, like ZooKeeper, and the parts of Confluent that come under its Community License, like ksqlDB, Schema Registry and the REST Proxy.
Features that only exist under Confluent's Enterprise License, or only in Confluent Cloud, aren't on the exam, so there's no need to study them.
How the study guide's chapters line up
Confluent doesn't say which topic belongs where, so this is our own mapping of the fifteen chapters in the study guide to the three domains.
| Domain | Chapters |
|---|---|
| Application Design | Fundamentals · Brokers, Topics and Storage · Kafka Internals · Reliable Delivery · Exactly Once · Schemas and Serialization |
| Development | Producers and Partitioning · Consumers and Consumer Groups · Errors and Retryability · The Admin Client · Kafka Connect · Kafka Streams |
| Deployment, Testing, Monitoring | Security and Authentication · Administration · Monitoring |
What to know in each domain
- For Application Design, know partitions and keys, the replication factor, acks and min.insync.replicas, delivery semantics, idempotent producers and transactions, and schema evolution.
- Development is about producer batching and retries, consumer groups, rebalancing and offset commits, error handling, the Streams DSL with its tables and windows, and connectors and transforms in Kafka Connect.
- Deployment, Testing and Monitoring covers SSL and SASL, ACLs, metrics like consumer lag and under-replicated partitions, and everyday administration.
A note on dates
The weights come from the blueprint Confluent published in 2020. The certification page has changed since then (it now lists matching and list-order questions as well), so check it before you book. Our exam guide sums up what it says.
Turning the list into a plan
Since design is 40 percent of the score, start with replication, delivery guarantees and partitioning, and move on to the client APIs after that. Our four-week plan goes through the chapters in that order, with the practice questions for each.
