Kafka Listeners - Explained
(This was cross-posted on the Confluent.io blog)
This question comes up on StackOverflow and such places a lot, so here’s something to try and help.
tl;dr : You need to set advertised.listeners (or KAFKA_ADVERTISED_LISTENERS if you’re using Docker images) to the external address (host/IP) so that clients can correctly connect to it. Otherwise they’ll try to connect to the internal host address–and if that’s not reachable then problems ensue.
Put another way, courtesy of Spencer Ruport:
LISTENERSare what interfaces Kafka binds to.ADVERTISED_LISTENERSare how clients can connect.
