Here’s a hacky way to automatically restart Kafka Connect connectors if they fail. Restarting automatically only makes sense if it’s a transient failure; if there’s a problem with your pipeline (e.g. bad records or a mis-configured server) then you don’t gain anything from this. You might want to check out Kafka Connect’s error handling and dead letter queues too.

Kafka Connect configuration is easy - you just write some JSON! But what if you’ve got credentials that you need to pass? Embedding those in a config file is not always such a smart idea. Fortunately with KIP-297 which was released in Apache Kafka 2.0 there is support for external secrets. It’s extendable to use your own ConfigProvider, and ships with its own for just putting credentials in a file - which I’ll show here. You can read more here.

Kafka Connect exposes a REST interface through which all config and monitoring operations can be done. You can create connectors, delete them, restart them, check their status, and so on. But, I found a situation recently in which I needed to delete a connector and couldn’t do so with the REST API. Here’s another way to do it, by amending the configuration Kafka topic that Kafka Connect in distributed mode uses to persist configuration information for connectors. Note that this is not a recommended way of working with Kafka Connect—the REST API is there for a good reason :)

Kafka Connect is a API within Apache Kafka and its modular nature makes it powerful and flexible. Converters are part of the API but not always fully understood. I’ve written previously about Kafka Connect converters, and this post is just a hands-on example to show even further what they are—and are not—about.

When you run Kafka Connect in distributed mode it uses a Kafka topic to store the offset information for each connector. Because it’s just a Kafka topic, you can read that information using any consumer.