Breaking the Kubernetes Barrier: Deploying Kafka Across Clusters

The growing adoption of Kubernetes and Kafka for distributed systems presents exciting opportunities alongside unique challenges for enhancing the availability and resilience of Kafka deployments. While Kubernetes offers powerful orchestration capabilities, deploying a Kafka cluster within a single Kubernetes cluster can expose organizations to limitations. A Kubernetes cluster outage may render the entire Kafka system unavailable, disrupting applications and clients. To overcome this, many organizations including us are working to achieve scalable, distributed, multi-zone Kafka clusters where the Kafka nodes span across multiple Kubernetes clusters in nearby availability zones.

This multi-cluster approach provides several key benefits. It ensures high availability by preventing single-cluster outages, supports migration efforts by allowing Kafka nodes to be deployed across clusters with minimal disruption, and optimizes resource usage by leveraging the combined capacity of multiple Kubernetes environments. However, implementing such deployments introduces significant challenges, including managing increased network complexity and costs, ensuring low-latency connectivity for performance, and maintaining data consistency in latency-sensitive environments.

This session explores practical methodologies and principles for deploying Kafka across Kubernetes clusters, focusing on broker and controller distribution, fault tolerance, scalability, cross-cluster communication, and resource synchronization. Attendees will gain insights into challenges associated with distributing Kafka across Kubernetes clusters and explore potential solutions within the Operator framework. Tailored for developers and operators, this talk provides actionable takeaways for enhancing Kafka’s resilience, scalability, and flexibility on Kubernetes, including best practices for resource integration, configuration management, and performance tuning.