Course Outline
Essentials of Kafka Administration
- The role of Kafka in a modern data platform and typical production responsibilities.
- Core concepts for operators: brokers, topics, partitions, offsets, and consumer groups.
- Replication fundamentals: leaders and followers, in-sync replicas, and availability trade-offs.
- Key operational highlights and common terminology used in runbooks.
KRaft Mode and Cluster Design
- KRaft basics: controllers, metadata quorum, elections, and their operational significance.
- Deployment planning: sizing for throughput, partitions, retention policies, and growth.
- Node roles and layouts: combined versus dedicated controllers, and fault domain considerations.
- Lab: inspect KRaft metadata, validate quorum health, and interpret controller logs.
Installation, Configuration, and Day-to-Day Operations
- Installation methods (packages, tarballs, containers) and standardization strategies for enterprise environments.
- Core broker configuration impacting reliability: listeners, replication, log directories, and retention.
- Safe service operations: startup order, graceful shutdown, and validation checks.
- Lab: deploy a multi-node cluster, verify broker registration, and confirm baseline produce and consume capabilities.
Managing Topics, Partitions, and Data Placement
- Topic lifecycle using the Kafka CLI: creating, describing, updating configs, and deleting.
- Selecting partitions and replication factors for real workloads, including common anti-patterns to avoid.
- Reassignments and balancing: when to move partitions and how to verify progress safely.
- Lab: create topics, trigger a partition reassignment, simulate a broker outage, and confirm recovery.
Securing Kafka for Production
- TLS for client and inter-broker traffic: certificates, trust chains, and validation steps.
- Authentication with SASL: selecting common mechanisms and avoiding misconfiguration.
- Authorization with ACLs: applying least-privilege patterns for admins, producers, and consumers.
- Lab: enable TLS and SASL, validate client connectivity, and apply ACLs for application roles.
Observability, Reliability, and Troubleshooting
- Monitoring essentials: controller health, under-replicated partitions, request latency, and disk/network saturation.
- Logs and metrics: reading broker logs and exposing metrics via JMX exporter to common observability stacks.
- Operational playbooks: rolling restarts, safe configuration changes, and handling disk-full and ISR issues.
- Lab: build a minimal alert set, diagnose a degraded cluster, and restore healthy replication.
Upgrades and Disaster Recovery Readiness
- Upgrade planning for Kafka: compatibility checks, staging, and rollback approaches.
- Backups and recovery expectations: what can be backed up, what cannot, and configuration recovery basics.
- Cross-cluster replication overview and when to use MirrorMaker 2 for DR and migrations.
- Wrap-up: operational checklist, handover artifacts, and next steps for production rollout.
Requirements
- A solid understanding of basic Linux administration (users, services, files, and permissions).
- Experience with TCP\/IP networking concepts (DNS, ports, firewalls, and load balancers).
- Basic scripting experience (Bash, PowerShell, or similar) for routine operational tasks.
Audience
- Kafka administrators and platform engineers responsible for operating Kafka clusters.
- Site reliability engineers and DevOps engineers supporting streaming platforms.
- Infrastructure and operations teams deploying new KRaft-based Kafka clusters or migrating from ZooKeeper.
Testimonials (5)
Possibility to perform independent exercises in the training environment.
Tomasz - PKO Zycie Towarzystwo Ubezpieczen S.A.
Course - Kafka for Administrators
To the point, proper pace (bash basics required though)
Krzysztof - Agora SA
Course - Kafka for Administrators
Trainer accepts questions at any time of the session, even if the subject was taught few days past.
GOODLUCK MASHIMBA - Tanzania Revenue Authority
Course - Kafka for Administrators
Nice presentation skill
Md Maruf Hossain - ATOS PGS sp. z o.o.
Course - Kafka for Administrators
Grate skills, examples, very good exercises