Kafka: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Chapter 12. Administering Kafka

Managing a Kafka cluster requires additional tooling to perform administrative changes to topics, configurations, and more. 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 natively to call those classes properly. While these tools provide basic functions, you may find they are lacking for more complex operations or are unwieldy to use at larger scales. This chapter will describe only the basic 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, default configurations do not restrict the use of these tools. 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. Always ensure that access to this tooling on your deployments is restricted to administrators only to prevent unauthorized changes.

Topic Operations

The kafka-topics.sh tool provides easy access to most topic operations. It allows you to create, modify, delete, and list information about topics in the cluster. While some ...