Using the Vault PKI secrets engine to set up a CA to use with the Strimzi Kafka Operator

Securing Kafka can be difficult. Securing Kafka on Kubernetes can also be diffult. But using Strimzi’s Kafka Operator makes it easy!

Below you will find a guide on how to use the Vault PKI secrets engine to generate an intermediate CA to use with the Strimzi Kafka Operator.

Using Helm to deploy the Strimzi Kafka Operator

The Kubernetes Helm project is the leading way to package, configure, and deploy Kubernetes resources. Let’s see how it’s possible to use it in order to deploy an Apache Kafka cluster on Kubernetes through the Strimzi project.

Strimzi 0.8.0 released!

We are delighted to announce the new Strimzi 0.8.0 release with many awesome new features!

Strimzi 0.7.0 released!

We are delighted to announce the new Strimzi 0.7.0 release with many awesome new features!

Strimzi 0.6.0 released!

We are delighted to announce the new Strimzi 0.6.0 release with many awesome new features!

Running Kafka on dedicated Kubernetes nodes

When running applications on OpenShift or Kubernetes, different pods get colocated on the same nodes. That is very useful, because it helps to decrease costs by better utilizing the available hardware. But it can also cause some issues. One of which is the noisy neighbour phenomenon. This is a situation when multiple applications which are intensively utilizing the same resource - for example network bandwidth or disk I/O - are scheduled on the same node. How do you avoid such problems when running Apache Kafka on OpenShift or Kubernetes with Strimzi? And how do you make sure your Apache Kafka delivers the best performance?

Strimzi 0.5.0 released!

We are delighted to announce the new Strimzi 0.5.0 release with many awesome new features!

Deploying Kafka on Kubernetes with Local storage using Strimzi

When deploying new Kafka cluster, one of the first decisions you have to make is the type of storage you want to use. Even before deciding on such storage aspects such as the type of filesystem which should be used, you have to decide a more basic question: should you run Kafka with local storage or with network attached storage?

Running Strimzi on OpenShift Online

OpenShift Online is a managed OpenShift-as-a-Service offering from Red Hat. It has a Starter tier and a Pro tier. The Starter tier is for free, but offers only very limited resources. In the Pro tier, you can buy additional resources. Can it be used to run Apache Kafka using the Strimzi project? Of course it can! But OpenShift Online has some limitations. So we will need to do some modifications to the default Strimzi installation files to get it up and running.

Strimzi 0.4.0 released!

We are really happy to announce the new Strimzi 0.4.0 release with a lot of fixes and interesting new features!

Strimzi at Red Hat Summit

If your plan is to attend the Red Hat Summit 2018 in San Francisco (May 8-10) then you have to know that the Strimzi project will be there as well !

The offered content is really awesome because there will be one session and a dedicated lab focused on it.

Apache Kafka on Kubernetes and OpenShift: Barnabas is dead ... long live Strimzi!

this is a re-publication of the following blog post

Almost one year and half ago, I started my journey about running Apache Kafka on Kubernetes and OpenShift. At that time, these containers orchestration platforms were focused on “stateless” (micro)services so there wasn’t a real support for a technology like Apache Kafka which is “stateful” by definition.