News, guides, and engineering deep dives.
Practical guidance on Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, and real-time data.
Best tools to reassign Kafka partitions
kafka-reassign-partitions.sh, Cruise Control, Strimzi, topicctl, topicmappr, Kpow and the managed-service options, scored on planning, throttling, batching, progress, cancellation and audit.
How to find and skip a poison pill in Kafka
A consumer stuck on one offset, lag climbing on one partition, the same deserialization error looping. How to confirm it is a poison pill, inspect the record, and skip it safely with a dry run first.
Best tools to manage poison pills in Kafka
Kafka poison pill tools compared on one rubric: isolation in the consumer, finding the bad record, skipping it safely, keeping a copy, and who may do it. Spring Kafka, the CLI, Kpow, AKHQ and more.
Best tools for Kafka role-based access control (RBAC)
Apache Kafka authorizes with ACLs, not roles. Eleven ways to add RBAC, scored on where each one enforces, who it binds, what it covers and how it audits change.
Best tools for Kafka schema registry management
Confluent Schema Registry, Apicurio, Karapace, AWS Glue, Redpanda, Kpow, Kafbat UI and AKHQ, scored on formats, compatibility checks, diffs, multiple registries and RBAC.
Best tools for Kafka SSO integration
Kafka SSO is two jobs: people signing in to Kafka UIs through Okta, Entra ID or Keycloak, and services authenticating to brokers with OAuth tokens. The tools for each half, scored on one rubric.
Best tools to manage Kafka topics at scale
Strimzi, Terraform, topicctl, JulieOps, Conduktor, AKHQ, Kafbat UI and Kpow, scored on topics as code, creation guardrails, scoped self-service, audit, multi-cluster reach and bulk operations.
Best Kafka terminal UIs (TUI)
Kafka terminal UIs scored on what you can see and change, multi-cluster, auth, keyboard UX and annual cost: ktea, Kaskade, kafui, Yozefu, kaftui, karat, the Kpow TUI and plain scripts.
How to diagnose and fix an unbalanced Kafka cluster
One broker hot, disk alerts on another, leader counts uneven. How to tell leader imbalance from data imbalance, the commands that fix each, how to throttle the move, and how to stop it coming back.