Charmed Kafka tutorial

The Charmed Kafka Operator delivers automated operations management from day 0 to day 2 on the Apache Kafka event streaming platform. It is an open source, end-to-end, production-ready data platform on top of Juju. As a first step this tutorial shows you how to get Charmed Kafka up and running, but the tutorial does not stop there. As currently Kafka requires a paired ZooKeeper deployment in production, this operator makes use of the ZooKeeper Operator for various essential functions. Through this tutorial you will learn a variety of operations, everything from adding replicas to advanced operations such as enabling Transport Layer Security (TLS).

In this tutorial we will walk through how to:

• Set up your environment using LXD and Juju.
• Deploy Kafka using a couple of commands.
• Get the admin credentials directly.
• Add high availability with replication.
• Change the admin password.
• Automatically create Kafka users via Juju relations.

While this tutorial intends to guide and teach you as you deploy Charmed Kafka, it will be most beneficial if you already have a familiarity with:

• Basic terminal commands.
• Kafka concepts such as replication and users.

Minimum requirements

Before we start, make sure your machine meets the following requirements:

• Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal) or later.
• 8GB of RAM.
• 2 CPU threads.
• At least 20GB of available storage.
• Access to the internet for downloading the required snaps and charms.

Step-by-step guide

Here’s an overview of the steps required with links to our separate tutorials that deal with each individual step:

• Set up the environment
• Deploy Kafka
• Integrate with client applications
• Manage passwords
• Enable encryption
• Cleanup your environment