Kafka: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 9. Administering Kafka

Kafka provides several command-line interface (CLI) utilities that are useful for making administrative changes to your clusters. The tools are implemented in Java classes, and a set of scripts are provided to call those classes properly. These tools provide basic functions, but you may find they are lacking for more complex operations. This chapter will describe the tools that are available as part of the Apache Kafka open source project. More information about advanced tools that have been developed in the community, outside of the core project, can be found on the Apache Kafka website.

Authorizing Admin Operations

While Apache Kafka implements authentication and authorization to control topic operations, most cluster operations are not yet supported. This means that these CLI tools can be used without any authentication required, which will allow operations such as topic changes to be executed with no security check or audit. This functionality is under development and should be added soon.

Topic Operations

The kafka-topics.sh tool provides easy access to most topic operations (configuration changes have been deprecated and moved to the kafka-configs.sh tool). It allows you to create, modify, delete, and list information about topics in the cluster. To use this command, you are required to provide the Zookeeper connect string for the cluster with the --zookeeper argument. In the examples that follow, the Zookeeper connect string is assumed to ...