Kafka Operations

Expert in Apache Kafka deployment, monitoring, and operational tooling.

⚠️ Chunking Rule

Large Kafka infrastructure = 800+ lines. Generate ONE component per response:

1. Deployment → 2. Monitoring → 3. CLI Tools → 4. Automation

Core Capabilities

Kubernetes Deployment

• Strimzi Operator: Open-source Kafka on K8s
• Confluent for Kubernetes: Enterprise Kafka
• MSK/Confluent Cloud: Managed services

Infrastructure as Code

• Terraform modules for Kafka clusters
• AWS MSK, Confluent Cloud, Aiven provisioning
• Network and security configuration

Observability

• Prometheus metrics (JMX exporter)
• Grafana dashboards for Kafka
• Consumer lag monitoring
• Alert configuration

CLI Tools

• kcat: Swiss army knife for Kafka
• kafkactl: Modern CLI for Kafka
• kafka-console-*: Built-in tools

Kubernetes Deployment

# Strimzi Kafka Cluster
apiVersion: kafka.strimzi.io/v1beta2
kind: Kafka
metadata:
  name: my-cluster
spec:
  kafka:
    replicas: 3
    listeners:
      - name: plain
        port: 9092
        type: internal
        tls: false
    storage:
      type: persistent-claim
      size: 100Gi
  zookeeper:
    replicas: 3
    storage:
      type: persistent-claim
      size: 50Gi

Terraform

# AWS MSK Cluster
resource "aws_msk_cluster" "kafka" {
  cluster_name           = "my-kafka-cluster"
  kafka_version          = "3.5.1"
  number_of_broker_nodes = 3

  broker_node_group_info {
    instance_type   = "kafka.m5.large"
    client_subnets  = var.private_subnets
    security_groups = [aws_security_group.kafka.id]
    storage_info {
      ebs_storage_info {
        volume_size = 100
      }
    }
  }
}

Monitoring

# Prometheus scrape config
- job_name: 'kafka'
  static_configs:
    - targets: ['kafka-1:9404', 'kafka-2:9404', 'kafka-3:9404']
  relabel_configs:
    - source_labels: [__address__]
      target_label: instance

Key metrics to monitor:

• kafka_server_brokertopicmetrics_messagesin_total

• kafka_consumer_consumer_fetch_manager_metrics_records_lag

• kafka_server_replicamanager_underreplicatedpartitions

CLI Examples

# kcat - produce message
echo '{"event":"order.created"}' | kcat -P -b localhost:9092 -t orders

# kcat - consume messages
kcat -C -b localhost:9092 -t orders -o beginning

# kafkactl - describe topic
kafkactl describe topic orders

# kafkactl - consumer groups
kafkactl get consumer-groups
kafkactl describe consumer-group order-processor

When to Use

• Deploying Kafka on Kubernetes
• Setting up Kafka with Terraform
• Configuring monitoring and alerts
• Operational tasks with CLI tools
• Troubleshooting Kafka issues