Which of the following is NOT a mandatory producer property?

• A. bootstrap.servers
• B. key.serializer
• C. value.serializer
• D. acks

Answer: (D)

Understanding producer configuration in Kafka hinges on which settings are required to get a producer running versus those that are optional but influence behavior. To connect to the cluster, the producer must know where the brokers are, so bootstrap.servers is mandatory. It tells the client where to reach the Kafka cluster. To actually send data, the producer needs to know how to turn your data into bytes, so both key.serializer and value.serializer are required; without serializers, the client wouldn’t know how to convert your keys and values into the byte format the broker stores. The acks setting controls how many broker acknowledgments are required for a send to be considered successful, affecting durability and latency. It’s optional because the producer has a default acknowledgment behavior if you don’t specify it, though you can customize it for stronger durability. Therefore, acks is the not-mandatory property, while bootstrap.servers and the two serializers are essential for basic operation. If you want greater durability, you can set acks to all.