Advanced8 min

Replica Recovery After Extended Failure

Observe how Kafka handles log recovery when a broker rejoins after missing significant data.

When a broker restarts after a long absence, it must truncate its log to the last known HWM and replicate all missed data from the current leader. This process is automatic but can be slow if much data was produced during the outage.

The steps below reference the interactive simulator, which is being migrated into /simulate next — until it lands, treat this as the written runbook for the exercise.

Steps