The Koperator (formerly called Banzai Cloud Kafka Operator) is a Kubernetes operator to automate provisioning, management, autoscaling and operations of Apache Kafka clusters deployed to K8s.
Overview 🔗︎
Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed streaming platform, and some of the main features of the Koperator are:
- the provisioning of secure and production-ready Kafka clusters
- fine grained broker configuration support
- advanced and highly configurable External Access via LoadBalancers using Envoy
- graceful Kafka cluster scaling and rebalancing
- monitoring via Prometheus
- encrypted communication using SSL
- automatic reaction and self healing based on alerts (plugin system, with meaningful default alert plugins) using Cruise Control
- graceful rolling upgrade
- advanced topic and user management via CRD
We took a different approach to what’s out there - we believe for a good reason - please read on to understand more about our design motivations and some of the scenarios which drove us to create the Koperator .
The Koperator is a core part of Banzai Cloud Supertubes that helps you create production-ready Apache Kafka cluster on Kubernetes, with scaling, rebalancing, and alerts based self healing. While the Koperator itself is an open-source project, the Banzai Cloud Supertubes product extends the functionality of the Koperator with commercial features (for example, declarative ACL handling, built-in monitoring, and multiple ways of disaster recovery). Read a detailed comparison of Supertubes and the Koperator .
Motivation 🔗︎
Apache Kafka predates Kubernetes and was designed mostly for static on-premise environments. State management, node identity, failover, etc all come part and parcel with Kafka, so making it work properly on Kubernetes and on an underlying dynamic environment can be a challenge.
There are already several approaches to operating Apache Kafka on Kubernetes, however, we did not find them appropriate for use in a highly dynamic environment, nor capable of meeting our customers’ needs. At the same time, there is substantial interest within the Kafka community for a solution which enables Kafka on Kubernetes, both in the open source and closed source space.
We took a different approach to what’s out there - we believe for a good reason - please read on to understand more about our design motivations and some of the scenarios which were driving us to create the Koperator .
We took a different approach to what’s out there - we believe for a good reason - read on to understand more about our design motivations and some of the scenarios which were driving us to create the Banzai Cloud Kafka operator.
Finally, our motivation is to build an open source solution and a community which drives the innovation and features of this operator. We are long term contributors and active community members of both Apache Kafka and Kubernetes, and we hope to recreate a similar community around this operator.
Apache Kafka, Kafka, and the Kafka logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation in the United States and other countries.
