Running Apache Kafka in Docker Container

Apache Kafka : Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system.
Docker containers : wrap up a piece of software in a complete filesystem that contains everything it needs to run: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries – anything you can install on a server. This guarantees that it will always run the same, regardless of the environment it is running in.
in this quick demo I will make use of a Docker image to run Apache Kafka in a Docker container.

Env: Single node pre-installed with RHEL7
Docker Installation:

yum update
curl -sSL https://get.docker.com/  | sh
service docker start
service docker status // to check service is up

Apache Kafka setup
1. pull the docker image for the zookeeper

docker pull dockerkafka/zookeeper

2. pull docker image for kafka

docker pull dockerkafka/zookeeper

3. Run zookeeper docker container in detach mode

docker run -d --name zookeeper -p 2181:2181 dockerkafka/zookeeper

4. Run docker container for Kafka

docker run --name kafka -p 9092:9092 --link zookeeper:zookeeper dockerkafka/kafka  &

5. get host ip where zk is running

docker inspect --format '{{ .NetworkSettings.IPAddress }}' zookeeper
172.17.0.2

6. get host ip where kafka is running

docker inspect --format '{{ .NetworkSettings.IPAddress }}' kafka

7. in the next course of action lets create a topic for that start interactive shell

docker exec -t -i exec kafka bash
kafka-topics.sh --create --topic vmstat_logs --zookeeper 172.17.0.2:2181 --replication-factor 1 --partitions 1

8. start a kafka producer which will publish vmstat output of every one second to the broker

vmstat 1 | kafka-console-producer.sh --topic vmstat_logs --broker-list 172.17.0.3:9092

9. open a different shell and start a consumer

docker exec -t -i kafka bash
kafka-console-consumer.sh --topic vmstat_logs --from-beginning --zookeeper 172.17.0.2:2181

the consumer will start running and consume the vmstat logs from the producer.