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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.
 21 Hours

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