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_{Wednesday, February 28, 2024}

Dear community,

We are extremely thrilled and excited to share that Charmed Apache Kafka K8s and Charmed ZooKeeper K8s have now been released as GA. You can find them in charmhub.io under the 3/stable track.

More information are available in the Canonical website, alongside its documentation. Also find the full announcement of the release here and here. And more importantly, make sure you don’t miss out the webinar that Raúl Zamora and Rob Gibbon will be holding later today.

Please reach out should you have any question, comment, feedback or information. You can find us here in Matrix or also on Discourse.

Features

• Deploying on Kubernetes (tested with MicroK8s)
• Apache ZooKeeper using SASL authentication
• Scaling up/down in one simple Juju command
• Multi-broker support and Highly-Available setups
• Inter-broker authenticated communication
• TLS/SSL support using tls-certificates Provider charms (see more here)
• SASL/SCRAM and mTLS authentication for clients
• DB access outside of Juju using data-integrator
• Persistent storage support with Juju Storage
• Super-user creation
• Documentation featuring Diàtaxis framework

Canonical Data issues are now public on both Jira and GitHub platforms.

GitHub Releases provide a detailed list of bugfixes, PRs, and commits for each revision.

Inside the charms

• Charmed Apache ZooKeeper K8s charm ships the Apache ZooKeeper 3.8.2-ubuntu0, built and supported by Canonical
• Charmed Apache Kafka K8s charm ships the Apache Kafka 3.6.0-ubuntu0, built and supported by Canonical
• Charmed Apache ZooKeeper K8s charm is provided with the charmed-zookeeper rock on the 3-22.04_stable tag (based on top of a Ubuntu LTS “22.04” base)
• Charmed Apache Kafka K8s charm is provided with the charmed-kafka rock on the 3-22.04_stable tag (based on top of a Ubuntu LTS “22.04” base)

More information about the artifacts is provided by the following table:

Technical notes

• A Charmed Apache Kafka K8s cluster is secure by default, meaning that when deployed if there are no client charms related to it, external listeners will not be enabled.
• We recommend deploying one data-integrator with extra-user-roles=admin alongside the Charmed Apache Kafka deployment, in order to enable listeners and also create one user with elevated permission to perform administrative tasks. For more information, see the How-to manage application guide.
• The current version of Apache Kafka does not yet support direct integration with Ingress, NodePort or LoadBalancer services. We recommend using it for usage within the K8s network.
• The current release has been tested with Juju 2.9.45+ and Juju 3.1+
• Inplace upgrade for charms tracking latest is not supported, both for Apache ZooKeeper and Apache Kafka charms. Perform data migration to upgrade to a Charmed Apache Kafka cluster managed via a 3/stable charm. For more information on how to perform the migration, see How-to migrate a cluster guide.