Part 1: Running Kafka on Kubernetes with Strimzi

Strimzi is an open source project that provides a set of operators for running Kafka on Kubernetes. It considerably simplifies the deployment and management of Kafka clusters.

Please pull down the github repo here to get access to the files used in this blog post.

Installing the Strimzi Operator

Assuming you have a Kubernetes cluster running and the helm CLI (installation instructions here), installing the Strimzi operator is the first step to getting a Kafka cluster running. We will first create a namespace for this,

Kubectl create ns kafka

We can use the helm chart for Strimzi to get it installed on the cluster,

helm repo add strimzi https://strimzi.io/charts/

helm install strimzi-release strimzi/strimzi-kafka-operator --namespace kafka

You should now see a pod running,

kubectl get pods -n kafka

NAME                                        READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
strimzi-cluster-operator-6bf566db79-kwbwg   1/1     Running   0          98s

Strimzi is now installed!

Installing the Kafka Cluster

Now for the Kafka cluster, we will prepare a yaml file,

apiVersion…