Important

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System Requirements

Hardware

On-Premises

The following machine recommendations are for installing individual Confluent Platform components:

Component Nodes Storage Memory CPU
Control Center 1 300 GB, preferably SSDs 32 GB RAM (JVM default 6 GB) 12 cores or more
Broker 3
  • 12 X 1 TB disk. RAID 10 is optional
  • Separate OS disks from Apache Kafka® storage
64 GB RAM Dual 12 core sockets
Connect 2 Only required for installation 0.5 - 4 GB heap size depending on connectors Typically not CPU- bound. More cores is better than faster cores.
ksqlDB 2 Use SSD. Sizing depends on the number of concurrent queries and the aggregation performed. 20 GB RAM 4 cores
REST Proxy 2 Only required for installation 1 GB overhead plus 64 MB per producer and 16 MB per consumer 16 cores to handle HTTP requests in parallel and background threads for consumers and producers.
Schema Registry 2 Only required for installation 1 GB heap size Typically not CPU- bound. More cores is better than faster cores.
ZooKeeper 3-5
  • Transaction log: 512 GB SSD
  • Storage: 2 X 1 TB SATA, RAID 10

Each write to ZooKeeper must be persisted in the transaction log before the client gets an ack. Using SSD reduces the ZooKeeper write latency.

4 GB RAM 2-4 Cores

Software

Operating Systems

Operating System 5.5.x 5.4.x 5.3.x 5.2.x 5.1.x 5.0.x 4.1.x 4.0.x 3.3.x
RHEL/CentOS 6.x (deprecated) yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes
RHEL/CentOS 7.x yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes
Debian 8 yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes
Debian 9 yes yes yes no no no no no no
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (deprecated) yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS yes yes yes no no no no no no
  • Windows is not currently supported for Confluent Platform. Windows users can download and use the ZIP and TAR archives, but must run the JAR files directly.
  • Windows is supported by the C/C++ and .NET clients.
  • macOS 10.13 and later is supported for testing and development purposes only.
  • For the file descriptor requirement for Kafka, see File Descriptors and mmap.
  • Control Center requires many open RocksDB files. Set the ulimit for the number of open files (ulimit -n) to a minimum value of 16384.
  • For the other Confluent Platform components, specifically Schema Registry and Replicator, you can leave the ulimit as the OS default.

Java

Java 8 and Java 11 are supported in this version of Confluent Platform (Java 9 and 10 are not supported). For more information, see Java supported versions. You need to separately install the correct version of Java before you start the Confluent Platform installation process.

Docker

Optional: Docker version 1.11 or later running on a supported operating system. This is required if you are installing Confluent Platform by using the Docker images.

Network

Control Center relies heavily on Kafka, so a fast and reliable network is important for performance. Modern datacenter networking speed of 1 GbE, 10 GbE should be sufficient.

Ports

By default the Confluent Platform components use these ports to communicate. These ports must be open.

Component Port
Kafka brokers (plain text) 9092
Kafka inter-broker communication 9091
Confluent Control Center 9021
Kafka Connect REST API 8083
ksqlDB Server REST API 8088
Metadata Service (MDS) if enabled 8090
REST Proxy 8082
Schema Registry REST API 8081
ZooKeeper 2181, 2888, 3888

Synchronize time

Clock synchronization on each Kafka broker is required to ensure the full system functions correctly. For example, secure network communication with the brokers that rely on TLS certificate verification may fail if clocks are not synchronized. Clock synchronization can be achieved using utilities like ntpd that implement the Network Time Protocol (NTP).