Confluent

Confluent currently runs three certifications, all pitched at working Kafka practitioners rather than a tiered ladder: the Confluent Certified Developer for Apache Kafka (CCDAK) for engineers writing producers, consumers, Kafka Streams, and Connect-based applications; the Confluent Certified Administrator for Apache Kafka (CCAAK) for people who configure, deploy, secure, and troubleshoot self-managed clusters; and the Confluent Cloud Certified Operator (CCAC) for teams running Kafka as a managed service on Confluent Cloud with Cluster Linking, Stream Governance, and fully managed connectors. Every exam is 90 minutes, remote proctored, and multiple choice.

Pick by role, not by sequence - none of the three is a prerequisite for another. If you write application code against Kafka, CCDAK is the default choice and the most widely recognized of the three. If you own broker configuration, security, and cluster operations, take CCAAK. If your organization has moved to Confluent Cloud, CCAC maps directly to that operating model. Each exam costs $150, the credential expires after exactly two years with no renewal shortcut (you retake the then-current exam), and a failed attempt means a 7-day wait before you can purchase and sit the exam again at full price.

CertCompanion carries practice banks for all three Confluent exams: 624 questions for CCDAK, 624 for CCAAK, and 630 for CCAC, each targeting the 70 percent passing threshold within the real 90-minute window. Every bank starts with 30 free questions, enough to gauge whether your Streams topology knowledge or your broker-tuning instincts are exam-ready before paying anything.

One gap worth knowing: despite Flink now sitting at the center of Confluent's stream processing platform, there is still no dedicated Flink certification as of late 2026 - the official catalog lists only CCDAK, CCAAK, and CCAC. CCAC is the newest of the three and the only one that tests cloud-native constructs like Cluster Linking and Stream Governance, so if your stack is Confluent Cloud rather than self-managed Kafka, it is the exam that actually matches your day job.