Installing Exposed Kafka Services

Exposed Kafka Services enable event-driven architectures and real-time data streaming for your workflow applications.

Kafka services provide a message-based interface that allows external clients to interact asynchronously with workflow automations. By exposing Kafka services, you enable loosely coupled, event-driven interactions where external systems can send Kafka message events to trigger processes or service flows.

For Authoring deployments, Kafka services are exposed to support development and testing of event-driven workflows. For Runtime deployments, OpenSearch services are exposed instead to support production search and indexing capabilities.

To install and configure Exposed Kafka Services, you need to enable the Kafka services capability in your IBM® Business Automation Workflow deployment. The installation process involves adding the Kafka component to your custom resource configuration (CR). To add Kafka component to your CR, make sure that you configure shared_configuration.sc_optional_components: "kafka" in your CR.

For platforms other than OpenShift Container Platform (OCP), you can configure Kafka as a load balancer to support gateway or custom ingress by setting sc_ingress_type: "loadbalancer".

Note: If you are configuring Kafka as a load balancer, each Kafka host name that is generated under the base domain (the bootstrap host and every broker host, for example, kafka-bootstrap.bawdeploy.ibm.com, kafka-0.bawdeploy.ibm.com, kafka-1.bawdeploy.ibm.com) is exposed as a LoadBalancer service and might have its own external IP address. On the DNS side, map each of these subdomains to its corresponding load balancer IP address.

For detailed installation and configuration instructions, see Creating a Kafka service.