Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka

Correct Answer: Amazon MSK provides fully managed Apache Kafka clusters, simplifying the setup, scaling, and maintenance of Kafka infrastructure.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) simplifies the management of Apache Kafka clusters by providing a fully managed service. This means that AWS takes care of the setup, scaling, and maintenance of the Kafka infrastructure, allowing users to focus on building their real-time data processing applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. The other options, such as automatic data compression and deduplication, native integration with Amazon S3, and built-in machine learning algorithms, are not the primary advantages of using Amazon MSK for real-time data processing.

Correct Answer: They should choose the serverless deployment mode, which automatically provisions and manages the resources required for their Kafka cluster.

The serverless deployment mode is the best choice for the company migrating their existing self-managed Apache Kafka cluster to Amazon MSK. This mode automatically provisions and manages the resources required for their Kafka cluster, minimizing the effort needed for cluster setup and maintenance. The provisioned deployment mode requires manual configuration and scaling of broker instances, which would not minimize the effort required. The dedicated deployment mode provides exclusive access to the underlying infrastructure but still requires the company to manage the Kafka cluster themselves, which does not align with their goal. The shared deployment mode allows multiple tenants to share the same Kafka cluster resources, but this is not the primary concern for minimizing setup and maintenance effort.

Correct Answer: Configure the replication factor for topics to be greater than 1, ensuring data is replicated across multiple brokers.

To ensure data is not lost in case of broker failures, the best approach is to configure the replication factor for topics to be greater than 1. This means that each partition of a topic will have multiple replicas distributed across different brokers in the Amazon MSK cluster. If a broker fails, the data will still be available on the other replicas, preventing data loss. Increasing the number of partitions doesn't provide protection against broker failures because partitions are not replicated across brokers. Automatic scaling of brokers helps handle increased data volume but doesn't directly address data durability. Amazon MSK does not have a built-in data backup feature, as data durability is typically achieved through replication rather than periodic snapshots.