Thanks for the feedback. Our DEV team has built a MirrorMaker-like process that mirrors all topics between two DCs. It is basically separate consumer/producer process that shovels data from DC A to DC B between two separate Kafka clusters.So in essence we have a replication factor of 6 (3 replicas in each DC). I guess I just need to get over my paranoia :)
Gene Robichaux Manager, Database Operations Match.com 8300 Douglas Avenue I Suite 800 I Dallas, TX 75225 -----Original Message----- From: Gwen Shapira [mailto:gshap...@cloudera.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2015 12:39 AM To: users@kafka.apache.org Subject: Re: Backups Hi, As a former DBA, I hear you on backups :) Technically, you could copy all log.dir files somewhere safe occasionally. I'm pretty sure we don't guarantee the consistency or safety of this copy. You could find yourself with a corrupt "backup" by copying files that are either in the middle of getting written or are inconsistent in time with other files. Kafka doesn't have a good way to stop writing to files for long enough to allow copying them safely. Unlike traditional backups, there's no transaction log that can be rolled to move a disk copy forward in time (or that can be used when data files are locked for backups). In Kafka, the files *are* the transaction log and you roll back in time by deciding which offsets to read. DR is possible using MirrorMaker though, since the only thing better than replication is... more replication! So you could create a non-corrupt file copy by stopping a MirrorMaker replica occasionally and copying all files somewhere safe. If it helps you sleep better at night :) Typically having kafka nodes on multiple racks and a DR in another data center is considered pretty safe. Gwen On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 9:22 AM, Gene Robichaux <gene.robich...@match.com> wrote: > Does anyone have any thoughts on Kafka broker backups? > > All of our topics have a replication factor of 3. However I just want to know > if anyone does anything about traditional backups. My background is Ops DBA, > so I have a special place in my heart for backups. > > > Gene Robichaux > Manager, Database Operations > Match.com > 8300 Douglas Avenue I Suite 800 I Dallas, TX 75225 >
