CCDAK Apache Kafka Practice Test

The main idea is how metadata is stored and who manages it. In a ZooKeeper-based Kafka cluster, ZooKeeper holds the cluster’s basic structural metadata—primarily which brokers are part of the cluster (cluster membership) and certain topic/partition configuration information. It does not hold the actual topic data or the consumer offsets, which are managed by Kafka itself. When moving to KRaft, that metadata responsibility shifts into Kafka’s own system. The metadata is stored in Kafka’s internal metadata log, replicated across the cluster using the Raft protocol, and managed by the brokers acting as the metadata quorum. There’s no separate ZooKeeper involved for cluster metadata in this setup. So, ZooKeeper houses the membership and related configuration data, while under KRaft, the metadata lives in Kafka’s own log on the brokers.