Kafka in a docker

	Kafka in a docker. This image is on steroids version of wurstmeister/kafka. In this image we have added scaling. All images are behing HAproxy load balancer which allows for spinning multiple replicas of kafka. On top of that there is Kafka Manager which can be access under [host IP]:9000 (see screenshots)
The image is available directly from Docker Hub

Pre-Requisites

• installed docker-compose https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/
• set default address to match your docker host IP. Use script called set-address with a paramater -a or --address
  Examle: ./set-address --address 192.168.1.200 this scrip will edit all required files.
  Note: Do not use localhost or 127.0.0.1 as the host ip if you want to run multiple brokers.
• if you want to customise any Kafka parameters, simply add them as environment variables in docker-compose.yml, e.g. in order to increase the message.max.bytes parameter set the environment to KAFKA_MESSAGE_MAX_BYTES: 2000000. To turn off automatic topic creation set KAFKA_AUTO_REATE_TOPICS_ENABLE: 'false'

Set default Host IP using script

./set-address --address 192.168.200.100

start-kafka-cluster - can deploy everything for you. It has all delays set to make sure all services are run in correct order and wait until they are availeble to the cluster.

Usage

There are few versions of how to use this image. For easy deployment I have added docker-compose.yml file which have all needed parameters specified. Another addition are bash scripts that you can use.

Script based deployment

start-kafka-cluster have few option that can be specified on run

--replicas (-r) - sets the amount of replicas that should be spin up on cluster creation
--test (-t) - Runs tests to make sure that producer and consumer can work with the cluster. It downloads polinux/php:7.1 image and builds missing package inside of that image and runs the tests against new kafka cluster. Bare in mind that this can take a while to finish

Example 1 simple start:

./start-kafka-cluster

It will start single instance of kafka and ask if user is ok with default depoyment.

Example 2 specify 4 replicas and run tests agains new cluster

./start-kafka-cluster --replicas 4

Example 3 add more replicas

docker-compose scale kafka=5

Docker compose based deployment

Start with simple:

docker-compose up -d 

Destroy cluster

Script based:

./destroy-kafka-cluster

docker-compose:

docker-composer stop 
docker-compose rm -f

Screencast examples

Start Cluster	Kafka Manager

Scale	Destroy Cluster

Broker IDs

If you don't specify a broker id in your docker-compose file, it will automatically be generated (see https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-1070. This allows scaling up and down. In this case it is recommended to use the --no-recreate option of docker-compose to ensure that containers are not re-created and thus keep their names and ids.

Automatically create topics

If you want to have kafka-docker automatically create topics in Kafka during creation, a KAFKA_CREATE_TOPICS environment variable is added in docker-compose.yml.

Here is an example snippet from docker-compose.yml:

    environment:
      KAFKA_CREATE_TOPICS: "Topic1:1:3,Topic2:1:1:compact"

Topic 1 will have 1 partition and 3 replicas, Topic 2 will have 1 partition, 1 replica and a cleanup.policy set to compact.

Advertised hostname

You can configure the advertised hostname in different ways

1. explicitly, using KAFKA_ADVERTISED_HOST_NAME
2. via a command, using HOSTNAME_COMMAND, e.g. HOSTNAME_COMMAND: "route -n | awk '/UG[ \t]/{print $$2}'"

When using commands, make sure you review the "Variable Substitution" section in https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/

If KAFKA_ADVERTISED_HOST_NAME is specified, it takes presendence over HOSTNAME_COMMAND

For AWS deployment, you can use the Metadata service to get the container host's IP:

HOSTNAME_COMMAND=wget -t3 -T2 -qO-  http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/local-ipv4

Reference: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-instance-metadata.html

JMX

For monitoring purposes you may wish to configure JMX. Additional to the standard JMX parameters, problems could arise from the underlying RMI protocol used to connect

• java.rmi.server.hostname - interface to bind listening port
• com.sun.management.jmxremote.rmi.port - The port to service RMI requests

For example, to connect to a kafka running locally (assumes exposing port 1099)

  KAFKA_JMX_OPTS: "-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote=true -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false -Djava.rmi.server.hostname=192.168.0.50 -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.rmi.port=1099 -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true"
  JMX_PORT: 1099

Jconsole can now connect at jconsole 192.168.0.50:1099

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Author

Przemyslaw Ozgo (linux@ozgo.info)

Inspired by [wurstmeister]https://hub.docker.com/r/wurstmeister/)'s wurstmeister/kafka image. Thanks!!!