Kafka Confluent REST API: Kafka Included?

Question

I have an exisiting Kafka Cluster. I want to install the Kafka REST Proxy:

https://github.com/confluentinc/kafka-rest

If I install confluent does that come with Kafka? I am afraid if I still it on my master Kafka node confluent will override all my settings and mess up my Kafka cluster.

How do you install Kafka REST when you have an existing Kafka cluster? This is not made clear on their website. I have CentOS and was going to try:

sudo yum install confluent-platform-oss-2.11

Any help would be great....

Accusatory

Answer 1

Download the Confluent Platform tarball, extract it, (or preferrably use APT/YUM) then only configure and run the REST proxy via kafka-rest-start

I wouldn't recommend using APT/YUM to install the entire confluent platform if you already have an existing Kafka. You might be able to only install kafka-rest using it, though.

Alternatively, backup your existing Kafka and Zookeeper property files, then place the Confluent Platform on top of the existing files, keeping the original files. If your Kafka is an old release, take this as a good opportunity to schedule an upgrade. Downloading Confluent isn't going to overwrite anything for the upstream Apache projects version for the corresponding release. If anything, it's an extension

Salve

Hi, can you elaborate a little how I can configure only confluent-kafka-rest to run? I have a kafka environment running with SASL_PLAINTEXT with GSSAPI. – Ovum

I've not run Confluent with SASL configurations. As far as I know, bootstrap.servers= SASL_PLAINTEXT://... would be a good start... And read docs.confluent.io/current/kafka-rest/docs/… Feel free to create a new post for that question, though – Salve

Thank you for this @cricket_007. Turns out you can just configure the REST proxy just like any other Kafka client and it will work. – Ovum