How to deploy Charmed Apache Kafka K8s

This guide provides platform-independent deployment instructions. For specific guides, see: AKS and EKS.

Caution

For non-K8s Charmed Apache Apache Kafka, see the Charmed Apache Kafka documentation instead.

To deploy a Charmed Apache Kafka K8s cluster:

  1. Set up a Juju Controller

  2. Set up a Juju Model

  3. Deploy and integrate Apache Kafka K8s and Apache ZooKeeper K8s charms.

  4. (Optionally) Create an external admin user

In the next subsections, we will cover these steps separately by referring to relevant Juju documentation and providing details on the Charmed Apache Kafka K8s specifics. If you already have a Juju controller and/or a Juju model, you can skip the associated steps.

Juju controller setup

Make sure you have a Juju controller accessible from your local environment using the Juju client snap.

List available controllers:

juju list-controllers

Switch to another controller if needed:

juju switch <controller>

If there are no suitable controllers, create a new one:

juju bootstrap <cloud> <controller>

where <cloud> – the cloud to deploy controller to, e.g., localhost. For more information on how to set up a new cloud, see the How to manage clouds guide in Juju documentation.

For more Juju controller setup guidance, see the How to manage controllers guide in Juju documentation.

Juju model setup

You can create a new Juju model using

juju add-model <model>

Alternatively, you can switch to any existing Juju model:

juju switch <model-name>

Make sure that the model is of a correct type (k8s):

juju show-model | yq '.[].type'

Deploy and integrate Charmed Apache Kafka K8s and Charmed Apache ZooKeeper K8s

Charmed Apache Kafka K8s and Charmed Apache ZooKeeper K8s can both be deployed as follows:

juju deploy kafka-k8s --channel 3/stable -n <kafka-units> --trust
juju deploy zookeeper-k8s --channel 3/stable -n <zookeeper-units> --trust

where <kafka-units> and <zookeeper-units> – the number of units to deploy for Charmed Apache Kafka K8s and Charmed Apache ZooKeeper K8s. We recommend values of at least 3 and 5 respectively.

Note

The --trust option is needed for the Apache Kafka application to work properly, e.g., use NodePort or juju refresh. For more information about the trust options usage, see the Juju documentation.

Connect Charmed Apache ZooKeeper K8s and Charmed Apache Kafka K8s by relating/integrating them:

juju integrate kafka-k8s zookeeper-k8s

Check the status of the deployment:

juju status

The deployment should be complete once all the units show active or idle status.

(Optional) Create an external admin users

Charmed Apache Kafka K8s aims to follow the secure by default paradigm. As a consequence, after being deployed the Apache Kafka cluster won’t expose any external listener. In fact, ports are only opened when client applications are integrated, also depending on the protocols to be used.

Note

For more information about the available listeners and protocols please refer to this table.

It is however generally useful for most of the use cases to create a first admin user to be used to manage the Apache Kafka cluster (either internally or externally).

To create an admin user, deploy the Data Integrator Charm with extra-user-roles set to admin:

juju deploy data-integrator --channel stable --config topic-name=test-topic --config extra-user-roles=admin

… and integrate it to the Apache Kafka K8s charm:

juju integrate data-integrator kafka-k8s

To retrieve authentication information, such as the username and password, use:

juju run data-integrator/leader get-credentials