Apache Kafka Raft (KRaft) is a consensus protocol introduced to remove ZooKeeper dependency from a Kafka deployment. This guide provides step-by-step instructions to configure Kafka in KRaft mode introduced in KIP-500.

Prerequisites

Follow the first steps of the How to deploy Charmed Apache Kafka guide to set up the environment. Stop before deploying Charmed Apache Kafka and continue with the instructions below.

Roles setup

A new role has been introduced to the charm, named controller. The application with this role assigned becomes a controller for the cluster. Using this role, the charm can be deployed either as a single app or multiple applications with a dedicated controller app. We recommend splitting controller tasks to a dedicated app.

Single application deployment

To deploy Charmed Apache Kafka in KRaft mode as a single application, assign both controller and broker roles to the application when using the juju deploy command:

juju deploy kafka --channel 3/edge --config roles="broker,controller"

Once the unit is shown as active|idle in the juju status command output, the deployment should be ready to be used.

Multiple applications deployment

To deploy Charmed Apache Kafka in KRaft mode as multiple applications, you need to split roles between applications. First, deploy the applications: a dedicated cluster controller and a broker cluster with relevant roles:

juju deploy kafka --channel 3/edge --config roles="controller" controller
juju deploy kafka --channel 3/edge --config roles="broker" broker

Finally, integrate the applications with the peer-cluster-orchestrator and peer-cluster roles:

juju integrate broker:peer-cluster-orchestrator controller:peer-cluster

The deployment is complete when all the units are shown as active|idle in the juju status command output.

(Optional) Create an external admin user

This step is normally done using data-integrator. However, the current ACL implementation has a bug where internal operations will fail on the integration step with the data integrator.

To create external users, use juju ssh to connect to a broker unit and use the charmed-kafka.configs bin command to create a new user:

juju ssh broker/0 -- sudo su
charmed-kafka.configs --alter --entity-type=users --entity-name=<admin-name> --add-config=SCRAM-SHA-512=[password=<admin-password>] --bootstrap-server <broker-ip>:9092 --command-config /var/snap/charmed-kafka/current/etc/kafka/admin.config

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