Chapter 4. Developer Previews
Developer preview features included with AMQ Streams 2.3.
Developer Preview features are not supported with Red Hat production service-level agreements (SLAs) and might not be functionally complete; therefore, Red Hat does not recommend implementing any Developer Preview features in production environments. This Developer Preview feature provides early access to upcoming product innovations, enabling you to test functionality and provide feedback during the development process. For more information about the support scope, see Developer Preview Support Scope.
4.1. UseKRaft feature gate
As a Kafka cluster administrator, you can toggle a subset of features on and off using feature gates in the Cluster Operator deployment configuration.
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.
This feature gate is at an alpha level of maturity, and should be treated as a developer preview.
This feature gate is experimental, intended only for development and testing, and must not be enabled for a production environment.
To enable the UseKRaft feature gate, specify +UseKRaft and +UseStrimziPodSets as values for the STRIMZI_FEATURE_GATES environment variable in the Cluster Operator configuration. The UseKRaft feature gate depends on the UseStrimziPodSets feature gate.
Enabling the UseKRaft feature gate
env:
- name: STRIMZI_FEATURE_GATES
value: +UseKRaft, +UseStrimziPodSets
Currently, the KRaft mode in AMQ Streams has the following major limitations:
- Moving from Kafka clusters with ZooKeeper to KRaft clusters or the other way around is not supported.
- Upgrades and downgrades of Apache Kafka versions or the AMQ Streams operator are not supported. Users might need to delete the cluster, upgrade the operator and deploy a new Kafka cluster.
-
The Topic Operator is not supported. The
spec.entityOperator.topicOperatorproperty must be removed from theKafkacustom resource. - SCRAM-SHA-512 authentication is not supported.
-
JBOD storage is not supported. The
type: jbodstorage can be used, but the JBOD array can contain only one disk. - Liveness and readiness probes are disabled.
-
All Kafka nodes have both the
controllerandbrokerKRaft roles. Kafka clusters with separatecontrollerandbrokernodes are not supported.
