Charmed Apache Kafka documentation

Charmed Apache Kafka is an open-source operator, packaged as a Juju charm, that simplifies the deployment, scaling, and management of Apache Kafka clusters on physical hardware, VMs, and Kubernetes, including deployments on AWS, Azure, OpenStack, and VMware.

This documentation covers both the VM charm and the Kubernetes charm. Select the VM or K8s tab in the guides; the selection is synchronized across each page.

Note

Terminology: the docs use VM as shorthand for machine charm deployments (Juju’s machine charms run directly on virtual machines or bare-metal hosts), and K8s as shorthand for Kubernetes. The two terms refer to the same substrate in each case.

The charm automates Apache Kafka operations from Day 0 to Day 2 with capabilities such as replication, TLS encryption, password rotation, application integration, and monitoring.

In this documentation

Tutorial

New to Charmed Apache Kafka? Start with the step-by-step Tutorial to learn the essentials:

Lifecycle

Features

Contributing

Contribute

How the documentation is organised

This documentation uses the Diátaxis documentation structure:

  • The tutorial walks you through deploying your first Charmed Apache Kafka cluster from scratch, step by step, on either substrate.

  • How-to guides help you solve specific operational tasks such as enabling TLS, connecting clients, or scaling brokers.

  • Reference lets you look up configuration options, status codes, file paths, and system requirements.

  • Explanation helps you understand the design decisions behind security, replication, and integration architecture.

Project and community

Charmed Apache Kafka is part of the Juju ecosystem of open-source, self-driving deployment tools. It can be integrated with multiple other Juju charms, also available on Charmhub.

It’s an open-source project developed and supported by Canonical that welcomes community contributions, suggestions, fixes and constructive feedback.

Get involved

Governance and policies

License and trademarks

Apache Kafka is a free, open-source software project by the Apache Software Foundation. Apache®, Apache Kafka, Kafka®, and the Apache Kafka logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries.

The Charmed Apache Kafka Operator is free software, distributed under the Apache Software License, version 2.0. See LICENSE for more information.