Welcome Kafka to the Bitnami Launchpad for Google Cloud Platform!

We are happy to introduce Kafka as part of the Bitnami library for the Google Cloud Platform!

Kafka has created a new way to use a distributed commit log. With its unique design, Kafka also provides the functionality of a messaging system.

Kafka is fast, scalable, durable and distributed by design. Some of Kafka's most popular uses include:

• Messaging
• Website Activity Tracking
• Metrics
• Log Aggregation
• Stream Processing
• Event Sourcing
• Commit Log

There are a lot of tools that integrate with Kafka as well, such as stream processing systems, Hadoop integration, monitoring, and deployment tools.

You can check out all of these features by simply deploying Kafka with one-click on the Bitnami Launchpad for Google Cloud Platform. Click the button below to get started. 

Want to get started with Kafka right now? Run the commands below from your Terminal to publish and collect your first message:

• This command will declare a new topic. Kafka server is configured to use the server public IP address:

$ kafka/bin/kafka-topics.sh --create --zookeeper 127.0.0.1:2181 --replication-factor 1 --partitions 1 --topic test

We use --replication-factor to indicate how many servers we are going to have a copy of the logs and --partition to choose the number of partitions for the topic we are creating.

• This one starts a new producer in the same server itself:

$ kafka/bin/kafka-console-producer.sh --broker-list PUBLIC_IP:9092 --topic test
this is my first message

• And finally you can collect your first message in the consumer:

$ kafka/bin/kafka-console-consumer.sh --zookeeper 127.0.0.1:2181 --topic test --from-beginning
this is my first message

If you want to know more about how to use Bitnami’s Kafka, you can read our wiki page. Still have questions? We would be happy to answer them on our community forum.