Kafka: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 8. Cross-Cluster Data Mirroring

For most of the book we discuss the setup, maintenance, and use of a single Kafka cluster. There are, however, a few scenarios in which an architecture may need more than one cluster.

In some cases, the clusters are completely separated. They belong to different departments or different use cases and there is no reason to copy data from one cluster to another. Sometimes, different SLAs or workloads make it difficult to tune a single cluster to serve multiple use cases. Other times, there are different security requirements. Those use cases are fairly easy—managing multiple distinct clusters is the same as running a single cluster multiple times.

In other use cases, the different clusters are interdependent and the administrators need to continuously copy data between the clusters. In most databases, continuously copying data between database servers is called replication. Since we’ve used “replication” to describe movement of data between Kafka nodes that are part of the same cluster, we’ll call copying of data between Kafka clusters mirroring. Apache Kafka’s built-in cross-cluster replicator is called MirrorMaker.

In this chapter we will discuss cross-cluster mirroring of all or part of the data. We’ll start by discussing some of the common use cases for cross-cluster mirroring. Then we’ll show a few architectures that are used to implement these use cases and discuss the pros and cons of each architecture pattern. We’ll then discuss MirrorMaker ...