I think you are right, even if you did put an ELB in front of kafka, it would only be used for getting the initial broker list afaik. Producers and consumers need to be able to talk to each broker directly, and also consumers need to be able to talk to zookeeper as well to store offsets.
Probably have to stunnel all the things. Id be interested in hearing how it works out. IMO this would be a great thing to have in kafka-contrib. On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 11:31 AM, Matt Wise <m...@nextdoor.com> wrote: > Hi there... we're currently looking into using Kafka as a pipeline for > passing around log messages. We like its use of Zookeeper for coordination > (as we already make heavy use of Zookeeper at Nextdoor), but I'm running > into one big problem. Everything we do is a) in the cloud, b) secure, and > c) cross-region/datacenter/cloud-provider. > > We make use of SSL for both encryption and authentication of most of our > services. My understanding is that Kafka 0.7.x producers and consumers > connect to Zookeeper to retrieve a list of the current Kafka servers, and > then make direct TCP connections to the individual servers that they need > to to publish or subscribe to a stream. In 0.8.x thats changed, so now > clients can connect to a single Kafka server and get a list of these > servers via an API? > > What I'm wondering is whether we can actually put an ELB in front of *all* > of our Kafka servers, throw stunnel on them, and give our producers and > clients a single endpoint to connect to (through the ELB) rather than > having them connect directly to the individual Kafka servers. This would > provide us both encryption of the data during transport, as well as > authentication of the producers and subscribers. Lastly, if it works, it > would provide these features without impacting our ability to use existing > kafka producer/consumers that people have written. > > My concern is that the Kafka clients (producers or consumers?) would > connect once through the ELB, then get the list of servers via the API, and > finally try to connect directly to one of those Kafka servers rather than > just leveraging the existing connection through the ELB. > > Thoughts? > > --Matt
