Lab
A Cloud Guru

Creating a Kafka Cluster with Confluent

With this hands-on lab, we will have the opportunity to install and configure a three-broker cluster using Confluent Community. We will start with three regular Ubuntu servers and build a working Kafka cluster. Kafka is a powerful tool for messaging and data stream processing. On top of this, Confluent offers additional features and immensely simplifies some aspects of the installation process for Kafka.

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Path Info

Level

Intermediate

Duration

30m

Published

Oct 18, 2019

Challenge

Install the Confluent Community Package on the Broker Nodes

On all three nodes, add the GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) key plus package repository, and then install Confluent Community, plus Java. The format should look like this:

wget -qO - https://packages.confluent.io/deb/5.2/archive.key | sudo apt-key add -

sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://packages.confluent.io/deb/5.2 stable main"

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y openjdk-8-jre-headless confluent-community-2.12

Challenge

Configure Zookeeper
1. On all three nodes, edit the hosts file:
```
sudo vi /etc/hosts
```
1. Add the following entries to the hosts file:
```
10.0.1.101 zoo1
10.0.1.102 zoo2
10.0.1.103 zoo3
```
1. Edit the zookeeper config file:
```
sudo vi /etc/kafka/zookeeper.properties
```
1. Delete the contents of the config file and add the following:
```
tickTime=2000
dataDir=/var/lib/zookeeper/
clientPort=2181
initLimit=5
syncLimit=2
server.1=zoo1:2888:3888
server.2=zoo2:2888:3888
server.3=zoo3:2888:3888
autopurge.snapRetainCount=3
autopurge.purgeInterval=24
```
1. Set up the zookeeper ID for each server:
```
sudo vi /var/lib/zookeeper/myid
```
1. On each server, set the contents of /var/lib/zookeeper/myid to the server's ID. On Node 1, enter 1, on Node 2, enter 2, and lastly on Node 3, enter 3:
```
<server id 1, 2, or 3>
```
Challenge

Configure Kafka
1. Edit the kafka config file:
```
sudo vi /etc/kafka/server.properties
```
1. Edit the broker.id and zookeeper.connect in the config file. Set the broker ID to the appropriate ID for each server (1 on Node 1, 2 on Node 2, and so on).
2. Set zookeeper.connect to zoo1:2181:
```
broker.id=<server id 1, 2, or 3>
...
zookeeper.connect=zoo1:2181
```
Challenge

Start Zookeeper and Kafka
1. Start and enable the Zookeeper and Kafka services:
```
sudo systemctl start confluent-zookeeper
sudo systemctl enable confluent-zookeeper
sudo systemctl start confluent-kafka
sudo systemctl enable confluent-kafka
```
1. Both services should be active (running) on all three servers. Check the services to make sure they are running:
```
sudo systemctl status confluent*
```
1. We can test our cluster by listing the current topics:
```
kafka-topics --list --bootstrap-server localhost:9092
```
The output should look like this:
```
_confluent.support.metrics
```

Author

A Cloud Guru

The Cloud Content team comprises subject matter experts hyper focused on services offered by the leading cloud vendors (AWS, GCP, and Azure), as well as cloud-related technologies such as Linux and DevOps. The team is thrilled to share their knowledge to help you build modern tech solutions from the ground up, secure and optimize your environments, and so much more!

What's a lab?

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