Questions about KRaft use in production

Architecture and Design
1

Hi,

I hope this post came under the right category, I did not find a category more suitable for it.

I was studying the KRaft mode of Kafka last weekend, and in Confluent’s documentation I ran into these limitations of KRaft that especially caught my eye:

  • Currently, migration from ZooKeeper to KRaft is in early access and available for clusters using features that are supported in KRaft mode.
  • Combined mode, where a Kafka node acts as a broker and also a KRaft controller, is not currently supported for production workloads. There are key security and feature gaps between combined mode and isolated mode in Confluent Platform.
  1. When would it be realistic to expect the ZK to KRaft migration to be production ready? I suppose that this limitation touches all Kafka installations from self-managed clusters to Confluent Cloud, is my assumption right?
  2. Does the limitations about combined more of a node also touch all Kafka installations from self-managed clusters to Confluent Cloud? When would it be realistic to expect the combined mode to be production ready?
  3. What cluster sizes would the combined mode be suitable for?

I had a hard time finding any resources on these questions in the web. If you have anything to link for me to read more about, I would be more than happy. I have a self managed cluster using ZK that I’m planning these changes for.

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