Starlight for Kafka

Starlight for Kafka brings native Apache Kafka® protocol support to Apache Pulsar®, enabling migration of existing Kafka applications and services to Pulsar without modifying the code. Kafka applications can now leverage Pulsar’s powerful features, such as:

Streamlined operations with enterprise-grade multi-tenancy
Simplified operations with a rebalance-free architecture
Infinite event stream retention with Apache BookKeeper™ and tiered storage
Serverless event processing with Pulsar Functions

By integrating two popular event streaming ecosystems, Starlight for Kafka unlocks new use cases and reduces barriers for users adopting Pulsar. Leverage advantages from each ecosystem and build a truly unified event streaming platform with Starlight for Kafka to accelerate the development of real-time applications and services.

This document will help you get started producing and consuming Kafka messages on a Pulsar cluster.

Starlight for Kafka Quickstart

To start connecting Starlight for Kafka, select Kafka in the Astra Streaming Connect tab.
When the popup appears, confirm you want to enable Kafka on your tenant.

You will not be able to remove the Kafka namespaces created on your tenant with this step. You must remove the tenant itself to remove these namespaces.
Select Enable Kafka.

Three new namespaces are created in your Astra Streaming tenant:
- kafka for producing and consuming messages
- __kafka for functionality
- __kafka_unlimited for storing metadata
  
  A new configuration file will be generated in the Connect tab that looks like this:
  username: <tenant-name> password: token:****** bootstrap.servers: kafka-aws-useast2.streaming.datastax.com:9093 schema.registry.url: https://kafka-aws-useast2.streaming.datastax.com:8081 security.protocol: SASL_SSL sasl.mechanism: PLAIN
Copy and paste the code or download it as a config file (it will be called ssl.properties).

You’re now ready to connect Kafka and Pulsar.

Example: Boo!

Create a new topic in the newly created kafka namespace. For this example, we created test-topic within the kafka namespace on the tenant-1 tenant.

This example uses tools included with the Apache Kafka tarball.

Move the ssl.properties file you downloaded to your Kafka_2.13-3.1.0/config folder. These values are required for SSL encryption. For this example, the values are:

bootstrap.servers=kafka-aws-useast2.streaming.datastax.com:9093
security.protocol=SASL_SSL
sasl.jaas.config=org.apache.kafka.common.security.plain.PlainLoginModule required username='tenant-1' password='token:{pulsar tenant token}'
sasl.mechanism=PLAIN
session.timeout.ms=45000

Change directory to Kafka.

Create a Kafka producer to produce messages on tenant-1/kafka/test-topic.

Once the producer is ready, it accepts standard input from the user.

$ bin/kafka-console-producer --broker-list kafka-aws-useast2.streaming.datastax.com:9093 --topic tenant-1/kafka/test-topic --producer.config config/ssl.properties
>boo

In a new terminal window, create a Kafka consumer to consume messages from the beginning of tenant-1/kafka/test-topic:

$ bin/kafka-console-consumer --bootstrap-server kafka-aws-useast2.streaming.datastax.com:9093 --topic tenant-1/kafka/test-topic --consumer.config config/ssl.properties --from-beginning
boo

Frighten yourself with boo as many times as you’d like, then return to your kafka namespace dashboard in Astra Streaming and monitor your activity.

Your Kafka messages are being produced and consumed in a Pulsar cluster!

Starlight for Kafka video

Follow along with this video from our Five Minutes About Pulsar series to migrate from Kafka to Pulsar.

What’s next?

Starlight for Kafka is based on the DataStax Starlight for Kafka project.

For more on Astra Streaming, see Astra Streaming Quickstart.