Kafka UI - features, pros and cons

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1

Let’s discuss the kafka-ui project.

The idea (was born here) is to share your experience so far, your thoughts, and pros and cons which you already noticed!

2

Recently gave it a try. And this is what I can say:

Features:

  • Sleak interface
  • Support of Schema Registry, Kafka Connect and ksqlDB
  • Support of Avro
  • Gives very good overview on your Consumers
  • Runs in a container

Discovered issues:

  • Requires DescribeConfigs CLUSTER level ACL or AuditAdmin RBAC role to start, which are rarely given to end users
  • Not clear how to use “centrally” (so that every end user uses their credentials to access Kafka Cluster, and not the credentials with which the service started)
  • Doesn’t support SSL and mTLS for Schema Registry connection (which leads to inability to deserialize Avro messages if the schemas are in a secured Schema Registry), addressed here
  • Doesn’t support SSL and mTLS for Kafka Connect (and probably ksqlDB - this wasn’t tested)
  • Configuration is not easy, due to poorly organized documentation, addressed here
3

Was able to overcome this by providing it with Truststore and Keystore in JVM properties like this (this is an additional environment variable set for the kafka-ui service in my docker-compose.yml:

JAVA_OPTS: "-Djavax.net.ssl.keyStore=/path/to/keystore.jks -Djavax.net.ssl.trustStore=/path/to/truststore.jks -Djavax.net.ssl.keyStorePassword=$KEYSTORE_PASSWORD -Djavax.net.ssl.trustStorePassword=$TRUSTSTORE_PASSWORD"

Keystore and Truststore passwords are provided in the .env file.