10.6. Managing KafkaTopic resources without impacting Kafka topics

Procedure

1. Annotate the KafkaTopic resource in OpenShift, setting strimzi.io/managed to false:

   oc annotate kafkatopic my-topic-1 strimzi.io/managed="false"

   Specify the metadata.name of the topic in your KafkaTopic resource, which is my-topic-1 in this example.

2. Check the status of the KafkaTopic resource to make sure the request was successful:

   oc get kafkatopics my-topic-1 -o yaml

   Example topic with a Ready status

   apiVersion: kafka.strimzi.io/v1beta2
   kind: KafkaTopic
   metadata:
     generation: 124
     name: my-topic-1
     finalizer:
       strimzi.io/topic-operator
     labels:
       strimzi.io/cluster: my-cluster
   spec:
     partitions: 10
     replicas: 2
   
   # ...
   status:
     observedGeneration: 124 

   1

   
     topicName: my-topic-1
     conditions:
     - type: Ready
       status: True
       lastTransitionTime: 20230301T103000Z

   1

   Successful reconciliation of the resource means the topic is no longer managed.

   The value of metadata.generation (the current version of the deployment) must match status.observedGeneration (the latest reconciliation of the resource).

3. You can now make changes to the KafkaTopic resource without it affecting the Kafka topic it was managing.

   For example, to change the metadata.name, do as follows:

   1. Delete the original KafkTopic resource:

      oc delete kafkatopic <kafka_topic_name>

   2. Recreate the KafkTopic resource with a different metadata.name, but use spec.topicName to refer to the same topic that was managed by the original
4. If you haven’t deleted the original KafkaTopic resource, and you wish to resume management of the Kafka topic again, set the strimzi.io/managed annotation to true or remove the annotation.