Kate Stanley

Since 2018 Strimzi has been helping you run Apache Kafka on Kubernetes. Now with version 4.0 of Kafka out, Strimzi has evolved to support the new KRaft protocol. Whether you’re an experienced Strimzi user, or you’re just getting started, it’s time to brush up on your knowledge! In this session I will demonstrate how you can use the CNCF Kubernetes operator Strimzi to deploy a Kafka cluster running in KRaft mode. We’ll cover the custom resources you need to create, as well as some of the configuration options available. I’ll also share some of the latest features that have been added to Strimzi around migrating to KRaft mode, scaling and rebalancing Kafka, and managing Connect clusters. Come along to see what makes Strimzi such a popular open source project.

From version 4.0 of Kafka, clusters will not support ZooKeeper anymore. This is a change that has been in the works for a while, and Kafka now has its own consensus protocol named KRaft. If you want to create a new Kafka cluster, using KRaft is pretty straightforward, but what if you already have existing Kafka clusters? Since Kafka 3.6, you can migrate ZooKeeper based clusters to KRaft. The process has a few intricacies about it and even more so if you want to automate it, rather than doing it manually for each cluster. In this session we will take you along for the ride of migrating a ZooKeeper based Kafka cluster, to a KRaft one. We’ll share the pitfalls we discovered while implementing an automated process in the open source Kafka operator Strimzi to handle this operation. It was certainly an adventure, so come along to see how you can navigate this migration as smoothly as possible, by avoiding a lot of error-prone manual steps on your production clusters.