Apache Kafka Complete Practice Exam 2025 – All-in-One Prep

Keeping the old broker in the cluster is not a suitable approach for replacing a failed broker in Kafka. When a broker fails, it is essential to remove it from the cluster to maintain the integrity and performance of the system. Leaving a failed broker in the cluster can lead to confusion about the state of partitions, cause delays in consumer or producer operations, and potentially affect the cluster’s overall reliability as it may still be trying to serve requests or participate in leader elections.

In contrast, restarting the broker immediately may sometimes be a valid quick fix if the failure was transient, although it’s crucial to confirm the root cause of the failure before proceeding. Manually updating a broker with new settings may be necessary when configuring a replacement broker correctly to ensure it meets the required specifications. Creating a new broker instance on the fly is a common practice, and it allows for the addition of new resources to the cluster to maintain redundancy and load balancing. Therefore, the other options can be part of a recovery plan, but retaining a failed broker is not appropriate for maintaining a healthy Kafka environment.