Charmed Kafka K8s Documentation - How to deploy

How to deploy Charmed Apache Kafka K8s

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 relate 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>

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

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

Deploy and relate Charmed Apache Kafka K8s and Charmed Apache ZooKeeper

Charmed Apache Kafka and Charmed Apache ZooKeeper 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>

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 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 and Charmed Apache Kafka by relating/integrating them:

juju relate 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 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 situations 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 K8s charm:

juju relate data-integrator kafka-k8s

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

juju run data-integrator/leader get-credentials