How to manage units

Unit management guide for scaling and running admin utility scripts.

Replication and Scaling

Increasing the number of Apache Kafka brokers can be achieved by adding more units to the Charmed Apache Kafka application, for example:

juju add-unit kafka -n <num_brokers_to_add>

For more information on how to manage units, please refer to the Juju documentation

It is important to note that when adding more units, the Apache Kafka cluster will not automatically rebalance existing topics and partitions. New storage and new brokers will be used only when new topics and new partitions are created.

Partition reassignment can still be done manually by the admin user by using the charmed-kafka.reassign-partitions Charmed Apache Kafka bin utility script. Please refer to its documentation for more information.

Running Apache Kafka admin utility scripts

Apache Kafka ships with bin/*.sh commands to do various administrative tasks such as:

• bin/kafka-config.sh to update cluster configuration
• bin/kafka-topics.sh for topic management
• bin/kafka-acls.sh for management of ACLs of Apache Kafka users

Please refer to the upstream Apache Kafka project, for a full list of the bash commands available in Apache Kafka distributions. Also, you can use --help argument for printing a short summary of the argument for a given bash command.

The most important commands are also exposed via the Charmed Apache Kafka snap, accessible via charmed-kafka.<command>. Please refer to this table for more information about the mapping between the Apache Kafka bin commands and the snap entrypoints.

To run most of the scripts, you need to provide:

1. the Apache Kafka service endpoints, generally referred to as bootstrap servers
2. authentication information

Juju admins of the Apache Kafka deployment

For Juju admins of the Apache Kafka deployment, the bootstrap servers information can be obtained using:

BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS=$(juju run kafka/leader get-admin-credentials | grep "bootstrap.servers" | cut -d "=" -f 2)

Admin client authentication information is stored in the /var/snap/charmed-kafka/common/etc/kafka/client.properties file is present on every Apache Kafka broker. The content of the file can be accessed using:

juju ssh kafka/leader `cat /etc/kafka/client.properties`

This file can be provided to the Apache Kafka bin commands via the --command-config argument. Note that client.properties may also refer to other files ( e.g. truststore and keystore for TLS-enabled connections). Those files also need to be accessible and correctly specified.

Commands can also be run within an Apache Kafka broker, since both the authentication file (along with the truststore if needed) and the Charmed Apache Kafka snap are already present.

Example (listing topics)

For instance, to list the current topics on the Apache Kafka cluster, you can run:

juju ssh kafka/leader 'charmed-kafka.topics --bootstrap-server $BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS --list --command-config /var/snap/charmed-kafka/common/etc/kafka/client.properties'

Juju external users

For external users managed by the Data Integrator Charm, the endpoints and credentials can be fetched using the dedicated action

juju run data-integrator/leader get-credentials --format yaml

The client.properties file can be generated by substituting the relevant information in the file available on the brokers at /var/snap/charmed-kafka/current/etc/kafka/client.properties

To do so, fetch the information using juju commands:

BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS=$(juju run data-integrator/leader get-credentials --format yaml | yq .kafka.endpoints )
USERNAME=$(juju run data-integrator/leader get-credentials --format yaml | yq .kafka.username )
PASSWORD=$(juju run data-integrator/leader get-credentials --format yaml | yq .kafka.password )

Then copy the /var/snap/charmed-kafka/current/etc/kafka/client.properties and substitute the following lines:

...
sasl.jaas.config=org.apache.kafka.common.security.scram.ScramLoginModule required username="<USERNAME>" password="<PASSWORD>";
...
bootstrap.servers=<BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS>