Charmed Kafka Documentation - How to deploy on Azure

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How to deploy on Azure

Azure is the cloud computing platform developed by Microsoft. It has management, access and development of applications and services to individuals, companies, and governments through its global infrastructure. Access the Azure web console at portal.azure.com.

Summary

Install Client Environment

WARNING: The current limitations:

  • Only supported starting Juju 3.6 (currently edge)
  • Juju cli should be on Azure VM for it to be able to reach cloud metadata endpoint.
  • Managed Identity and the Juju resources should be on the same Azure subscription
  • The current setup has been tested on Ubuntu 22.04+

Juju

Install Juju via snap:

sudo snap install juju --channel 3.6/edge

Check that the Juju version is correctly installed:

juju version

which should show:

3.6-rc1-genericlinux-amd64

Azure CLI

Install the Azure CLI on Linux distributions by following the Azure CLI’s installation guide.

Verify that it is correctly installed:

az --version

The above command should produce output similar to the following:

azure-cli                         2.65.0

core                              2.65.0
telemetry                          1.1.0

Dependencies:
msal                              1.31.0
azure-mgmt-resource               23.1.1

Python location '/opt/az/bin/python3'
Extensions directory '/home/deusebio/.azure/cliextensions'

Python (Linux) 3.11.8 (main, Sep 25 2024, 11:33:44) [GCC 11.4.0]

Legal docs and information: aka.ms/AzureCliLegal


Your CLI is up-to-date.

Authenticate

For more information on how to authenticate, refer to the Juju documentation and a dedicated user guide on how to register Azure on Juju.

First of all, retrieve your subscription-id

az login

After providing the authentication via web browser, you will be shown a list of information and a table with the subscriptions connected to your user, e.g.:

No     Subscription name                     Subscription ID                       Tenant
-----  ------------------------------------  ------------------------------------  -------------
[1] *  <subscription_name>                   <subscription_id>                     canonical.com
[2]    <other_subscription_name>             <other_subscription_id>               canonical.com

In the prompt, select the subscription id you would like to connect the controller to, and store the id as it will be needed in the next step when bootstrapping the controller.

Bootstrap Juju controller on Azure

First, you need to add a set of credentials to your Juju client:

juju add-credentials azure

This will start a script that will help you set up the credentials, where you will be asked:

  • credential-name — a sensible name that will help you identify the credential set, say <CREDENTIAL_NAME>
  • region — a default region that is most convenient to deploy your controller and applications. Note that credentials are not region-specific
  • auth type — authentication type. Select interactive, which is the recommended way to authenticate to Azure using Juju
  • subscription_id — the value <subscription_id> taken in the previous step
  • application_name — any unique string to avoid collision with other users or applications
  • role-definition-name — any unique string to avoid collision with other users or applications, and store it as <AZURE_ROLE>

Next, you will be asked to authenticate the requests via your web browser with the following message:

To sign in, use a web browser to open the page https://microsoft.com/devicelogin and enter the code <YOUR_CODE> to authenticate.

In the browser, open the authentication page and enter the code <YOUR_CODE> provided in the output.

You will be asked to authenticate twice, for allowing the creation of two different resources in Azure.

You will see a message that the credentials have been added locally:

Credential <CREDENTIAL_NAME> added locally for cloud "azure".

Once the credentials are correctly added, we can bootstrap a controller:

juju bootstrap azure <CONTROLLER_NAME>

Deploy charms

Create a new Juju model, if needed:

juju add-model <MODEL_NAME>

(Optional) Increase the debug level if you are troubleshooting charms:

juju model-config logging-config='<root>=INFO;unit=DEBUG'

Then, Charmed Kafka can be deployed as usual. However, note that the smallest instance types on Azure may not have enough resources for hosting a Kafka broker. We recommend selecting an instance type that provides at the very least 8 GB of RAM and 4 cores. For more guidance on production environment sizing, see the Requirements page. You can find more information about the available instance types in the Azure documentation.

Deploy and integrate Kafka and ZooKeeper, for example:

juju deploy zookeeper -n3 --channel 3/stable
juju deploy kafka -n3 --constraints "instance-type=Standard_A4_v2" --channel 3/stable
juju integrate kafka zookeeper

We also recommend to deploy a Data Integrator for creating an admin user to manage the content of the Kafka cluster:

juju deploy data-integrator admin --channel edge \
  --config extra-user-roles=admin \
  --config topic-name=admin-topic

And integrate it with the Kafka application:

juju integrate kafka admin

For more information on Data Integrator and how to use it, please refer to the how-to manage applications guide.

Clean up

Always clean Azure resources that are no longer necessary! Abandoned resources are tricky to detect and they can become expensive over time.

To destroy the Juju controller and remove the Azure instance (Warning: all your data will be permanently removed):

juju destroy-controller <CONTROLLER_NAME> --destroy-all-models --destroy-storage --force

Use juju list-controllers to retrieve the names of the controllers that have been registered to your local client.

Next, check and manually delete all unnecessary Azure VM instances, to show the list of all your Azure VMs run the following command (make sure to use the correct region):

az resource list

List your Juju credentials with the juju credentials command:

Client Credentials:
Cloud        Credentials
azure        NAME_OF_YOUR_CREDENTIAL

Remove Azure CLI credentials from Juju:

juju remove-credential azure NAME_OF_YOUR_CREDENTIAL

After deleting the credentials, the interactive process may still leave the role resource and its assignment hanging around. We recommend checking if these are still present by running:

az role definition list --name <AZURE_ROLE>

To get the full list, use it without specifying the --name argument.

You can check whether you still have a role assignment bound to <AZURE_ROLE> registered by using:

az role assignment list --role <AZURE_ROLE>

If there is an unwanted role left, you can remove the role assignment first and then the role itself with the following commands:

az role assignment delete --role <AZURE_ROLE>
az role definition delete --name <AZURE_ROLE>

Finally, logout Azure CLI user credentials to prevent any credential leakage:

az logout