Chapter 6. Developer Previews

To use KafkaNodePool resources to manage the configuration of pools of Kafka nodes, try the KafkaNodePools feature gate.

For more information, see Section 3.5, “(Preview) Node pools for managing nodes in a Kafka cluster”.

To set up the Topic Operator so that it only manages Kafka topics associated with KafkaTopic resources, try the UnidirectionalTopicOperator feature gate.

For more information, see Section 3.6, “(Preview) Unidirectional topic management using the Topic Operator”.

To use StrimziPodSet resources to manage Kafka Connect and Kafka MirrorMaker 2 pods, try the StableConnectIdentities feature gate.

The StableConnectIdentities feature gate controls the use of StrimziPodSet resources to manage Kafka Connect and Kafka MirrorMaker 2 pods instead of using OpenShift Deployment resources. This helps to minimize the number of rebalances of connector tasks.

To enable the StableConnectIdentities feature gate, specify +StableConnectIdentities as a value for the STRIMZI_FEATURE_GATES environment variable in the Cluster Operator configuration.

env:
  - name: STRIMZI_FEATURE_GATES
    value: +StableConnectIdentities

See StableConnectIdentities feature gate.

Apache Kafka is in the process of phasing out the need for ZooKeeper. With the new UseKRaft feature gate enabled, you can try deploying a Kafka cluster in KRaft (Kafka Raft metadata) mode without ZooKeeper.

To use KRaft mode, you must also use KafkaNodePool resources to manage the configuration of groups of nodes. To enable the UseKRaft feature gate, specify +UseKRaft,+KafkaNodePools as values for the STRIMZI_FEATURE_GATES environment variable in the Cluster Operator configuration.

env:
  - name: STRIMZI_FEATURE_GATES
    value: +UseKRaft,+KafkaNodePools

Currently, the KRaft mode in AMQ Streams has the following major limitations:

See the following: