Chapter 5. Producing Events/Messages to Kafka on a Secured Cluster

Prerequisite: Make sure that you have enabled access to the topic (via Ranger or native ACLs) for the user associated with the producer process. We recommend that you use Ranger to manage permissions. For more information, see the Apache Ranger User Guide for Kafka.

During the installation process, Ambari configures a series of Kafka client and producer settings, and creates a JAAS configuration file for the Kafka client. It is not necessary to modify these settings, but for more information about them see Appendix A, Kafka Configuration Options.

Note: Only the Kafka Java API is supported for Kerberos. Third-party clients are not supported.

To produce events/messages:

Specify the path to the JAAS configuration file as one of your JVM parameters:
-Djava.security.auth.login.config=/usr/hdp/current/kafka-broker/config/kafka_client_jaas.conf
For more information about the kafka_client_jaas file, see "JAAS Configuration File for the Kafka Client" in Kafka Configuration Options.
kinit with the principal's keytab.
Launch kafka-console-producer.sh with the following configuration options. (Note: these settings are the same as in previous versions, except for the addition of --security-protocol SASL_PLAINTEXT.)
./bin/kafka-console-producer.sh --broker-list <hostname:port [,hostname:port, …]> --topic <topic-name> --security-protocol SASL_PLAINTEXT
For example:
./bin/kafka-console-producer.sh --broker-list c6401.ambari.apache.org:6667,c6402.ambari.apache.org:6667 --topic test_topic --security-protocol SASL_PLAINTEXT

Troubleshooting

Issue: If you launch the producer without specifying the security-protocol option, you will see the following error:

2015-07-21 04:14:06,611] ERROR fetching topic metadata for topics 
[Set(test_topic)] from broker 
[ArrayBuffer(BrokerEndPoint(0,c6401.ambari.apache.org,6667), 
BrokerEndPoint(1,c6402.ambari.apache.org,6667))] failed 
(kafka.utils.CoreUtils$)
kafka.common.KafkaException: fetching topic metadata for topics 
[Set(test_topic)] from broker 
[ArrayBuffer(BrokerEndPoint(0,c6401.ambari.apache.org,6667), 
BrokerEndPoint(1,c6402.ambari.apache.org,6667))] failed 
     at kafka.client.ClientUtils$.fetchTopicMetadata(ClientUtils.scala:73)
Caused by: java.io.EOFException: Received -1 when reading from channel, socket has likely been closed.
     at kafka.utils.CoreUtils$.read(CoreUtils.scala:193)
     at kafka.network.BoundedByteBufferReceive.readFrom(BoundedByteBufferReceive.scala:54)

Solution: Add --security-protocol SASL_PLAINTEXT to the kafka-console-producer.sh runtime options.

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