hairyhum/kafka-demo

Kafka demo minikube project

In order to demonstrate provisioning of kafka integration into K8s environment we set up kafka server, consumer and producer in a minikube cluster.

We configure kafka interceptors for producer and consumer and kafka outlet to connect to the brokers.

Requirements

• Docker
• Minikube installed https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/
• Helm https://helm.sh/
• Ockam to enroll and provision components in a project https://docs.ockam.io/

Demo sequence

1. Enroll with ockam orchestrator

ockam enroll

This will create a default project which can be used in the demo

2. Get the project information into mnt/project.json

This is needed temporarily to configure kafka-outlet FIXME: remove this step when switching to rust outlet and to credential for the outlet

ockam project information default --output=json > mnt/project.json

This project information will be used by provisioned ockam nodes

3. Create enrollment tokens for components to authenticate with the project

FIXME: add token for the outlet

ockam project enroll --attribute role=member > mnt/consumer.token
ockam project enroll --attribute role=member > mnt/producer.token

QUESTION: do we have control over expiration of the token?

4. Start the minikube cluster with mnt directory mounted

minikube start --mount --mount-string="$(pwd)/mnt:/mnt/minikube"

mnt directory is used to provision project information and enrollment tokens to the ockam containers

NOTE: Further commands in this demo assume that minikube configures kubectl and helm are using the minikube cluster.

5. Install kafka helm release

helm install kafka oci://registry-1.docker.io/bitnamicharts/kafka

We assume default configuration of the helm release resources in the demo configs:

• service kafka with port 9092
• three kafka brokers

NOTE: before next steps you need to build the images if you're using locally built images

6. Start kafka-outlet pod

kubectl apply -f kafka-outlet.yaml

This pod will connect to the kafka service.

7. Start kafka-consumer pod

kubectl apply -f kafka-consumer.yaml

This pod starts kafka-console-consumer.sh reading from demo-topic

This pod includes ockam kafka sidecar which will intercept and decrypt all encrypted messages.

8. Show logs from kafka consumer which will contain decrypted messages

kubectl logs -f kafka-consumer

9. Start kafka-producer pod

kubectl apply -f kafka-producer.yaml

This pod starts with kafka docker image, but only runs sleep infinity, to start an actual producer we will use kubectl exec.

This pod includes ockam kafka sidecar which will intercept and encrypt messages.

10. Start kafka-console-producer on producer pod to send messages to the topic

kubectl exec --tty -i kafka-producer --namespace default -- kafka-console-producer.sh --topic demo-topic --bootstrap-server localhost:9092

Important note here: we set localhost:9092 as a bootstrap server instead of kafka:9092, that will make the producer app connect to the ockam sidecar instead of directly to kafka.

Building images

Currently pod configurations are using locall images, please make sure you have loaded them in minikube:

For outlet image:

eval $(minikube docker-env)

cd ockam_kafka_outlet
docker build build -t ockam_kafka_outlet:latest .

See the pod configs

Implementation details

• Currently using elixir app for kafka-outlet, it will validate credentials but will not present its own credentials to the interceptor sidecars.
• We have to use ockam nodes as sidecars because current implementation assumes localhost for dynamic inlets, we could change that with some configuration

Issues

Node is not presenting credentials when --project-route is not a project. Disabled credential check for now in the outlet app. There is no API to check that identity is already enrolled, I'm using node list to check the node existence. Since tokens are 1-use only, we need to re-create them when we re-deploy consumer or producer.

Building images

This setup need outlet image and kafka interceptor image.

They need to be built for minikube as following:

For outlet image:

cd ./ockam_kafka_outlet
eval $(minikube docker-env)
docker build -t ockam_kafka_outlet:latest .

For kafka interceptor:

IMPORTANT You need to have ockam binary in your ockam_sidecar directory

First you need to build ockam binary for your architecture, currently there is one pre-built for aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu

Then you need to put this binary named ockam into ockam_sidecar directory.

For minikube running on arm64 mac, you can copy ockam-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu

cd ./ockam_sidecar
eval $(minikube docker-env)
docker build -t ockam-kafka-sidecar:latest .