4.2. Broker types

Knative provides a default, channel-based broker implementation. This channel-based broker can be used for development and testing purposes, but does not provide adequate event delivery guarantees for production environments. The default broker is backed by the InMemoryChannel channel implementation by default.

If you want to use Apache Kafka to reduce network hops, use the Knative broker implementation for Apache Kafka. Do not configure the channel-based broker to be backed by the KafkaChannel channel implementation.

For production-ready Knative Eventing deployments, Red Hat recommends using the Knative broker implementation for Apache Kafka. The broker is an Apache Kafka native implementation of the Knative broker, which sends CloudEvents directly to the Kafka instance.

The Knative broker has a native integration with Kafka for storing and routing events. This allows better integration with Kafka for the broker and trigger model over other broker types, and reduces network hops. Other benefits of the Knative broker implementation include:

The Knative broker implementation for Apache Kafka stores incoming CloudEvents as Kafka records, using the binary content mode. This means that all CloudEvent attributes and extensions are mapped as headers on the Kafka record, while the data spec of the CloudEvent corresponds to the value of the Kafka record.