1 is not possible as it doesn't provide resilience to failure, 2 is not enough as if we take a broker down for maintenance, we cannot tolerate a broker failure, and 6 is impossible as we only have 3 brokers (RF cannot be greater than the number of brokers). Here the correct answer is 3

Here, you shouldn't commit offsets 11 or 10 as it would indicate that the message #10 has been processed successfully.

connect-configs stores configurations, connect-status helps to elect leaders for connect, and connect-offsets store source offsets for source connectors

On the producer side, after receiving base64 data, the REST Proxy will convert it into bytes and then send that bytes payload to Kafka. Therefore consumers reading directly from Kafka will receive binary data.

A kafka broker automatically creates a topic under the following circumstances- When a producer starts writing messages to the topic - When a consumer starts reading messages from the topic - When any client requests metadata for the topic