How to deploy Charmed Apache Kafka
For K8s Charmed Apache Kafka, see the Charmed Apache Kafka K8s documentation instead.
To deploy a Charmed Apache Kafka cluster on a bare environment, it is necessary to:
- Set up a Juju Controller
- Set up a Juju Model
- Deploy Charmed Apache Kafka and Charmed Apache ZooKeeper
- (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 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: Make sure that the controller’s back-end cloud is not K8s. The cloud information can be retrieved with the following command
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 (not k8s):
juju show-model | yq '.[].type'
Deploy Charmed Apache Kafka and Charmed Apache ZooKeeper
Charmed Apache Kafka and Charmed Apache ZooKeeper can both be deployed as follows:
$ juju deploy kafka --channel 3/stable -n <kafka-units> --trust
$ juju deploy zookeeper --channel 3/stable -n <zookeeper-units>
where <kafka-units> and <zookeeper-units> – the number of units to deploy for Charmed Apache Kafka and Charmed Apache ZooKeeper. We recommend values of at least 3 and 5 respectively.
The --trust option is needed for the Apache Kafka application if NodePort is used. For more information about the trust options usage, see the Juju documentation.
Connect Charmed Apache ZooKeeper and Charmed Apache Kafka by relating/integrating them:
$ juju relate kafka zookeeper
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 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 related, also depending on the protocols to be used.
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 relate it to the Apache Kafka charm:
juju relate data-integrator kafka
To retrieve authentication information, such as the username and password, use:
juju run data-integrator/leader get-credentials