4.2. Topic Operator

The Topic Operator provides a way of managing topics in a Kafka cluster through OpenShift resources.

The role of the Topic Operator is to keep a set of KafkaTopic OpenShift resources describing Kafka topics in-sync with corresponding Kafka topics.

Specifically, if a KafkaTopic is:

Working in the other direction, if a topic is:

This allows you to declare a KafkaTopic as part of your application’s deployment and the Topic Operator will take care of creating the topic for you. Your application just needs to deal with producing or consuming from the necessary topics.

The Topic Operator maintains information about each topic in a topic store, which is continually synchronized with updates from Kafka topics or OpenShift KafkaTopic custom resources. Updates from operations applied to a local in-memory topic store are persisted to a backup topic store on disk. If a topic is reconfigured or reassigned to other brokers, the KafkaTopic will always be up to date.