How I cleared my Confluent Kafka Developer for Apache Kafka(CCDAK)

There are not many articles online which help in the exam preparation for CCDAK exam. I have churned out a quick article on my journey with the preparation and various materials I studied to clear the exam.

Exam Preparation Guide

1. Video tutorials by Stephane Maarek

There are a total of 6 video tutorials, the link is below. The basic concepts are very well explained with examples.

How to Prepare for the Confluent Certified Developer for Apache Kafka (CCDAK) exam

2. CCDAK sample exams by Stephane Maarek

There are a total of 3 exams of 50 questions each. The sample exams are very useful and the real exam has many concepts from these exams. Please study all the concepts extremely well. These videos are present everywhere — Udemy, Linkedin Learning etc

3. Documentation from Confluent

Link: https://docs.confluent.io/platform/current/overview.html

Confluent’s documentation is great and easily digestible which is important for the exam. Go through the entire documentation on the left panel (as shown below) and concentrate on FAQ’s well. They help you think in various directions.

4. Sample question paper from Confluent

Confluent has published 1 sample paper on their main website. The question paper is rather medium difficulty and helps with the concepts.

Link: SamplePaper

5. Few chapters from the book “Kafka — The Definitive Guide”

Specifically chapters 3,4,5,6 are where the questions and concepts of the exam is based upon. Chapter 4 has great programming concepts and 2–3 questions definitely are code based in the examination.

Link to download — https://www.confluent.io/resources/kafka-the-definitive-guide/

Type of questions that came in the exam

1. Multiple questions on stateful and stateless transformations — around 3
2. Basic theory simple questions — around 10
3. Consumer rebalance scenario based questions
4. Code questions on metadata, what does it signify (chapter 4 from the above PDF really helps)

Ending notes about the exam

1. This exam is expensive, please study well
2. You can reschedule the exam multiple times before the exam ( I rescheduled it once and my friend had scheduled it twice)
3. Prepare well. This exam cannot be cracked by just looking into the exam questions, this needs a good preparation by deep diving into concepts
4. Practice the exam questions (there are 150 practice questions), they are helpful
5. I took around 3 months to prepare with a day job . I also gave in 12 days of rigorous revision before the exam
6. The exam is conducted online with a virtual proctor who monitored me on a zoom call on a screen share session. I had presented my photo ID followed by showing my entire desk to him. He checked my entire screen for open windows and applications and ensured they were all closed.