Mount Docker External Volumes in Confluent Platform

When working with Docker, you may sometimes need to persist data in the event of a container going down or share data across containers. In order to do so, you can use Docker Volumes. For Confluent Platform, you need to use external volumes for several main use cases:

  1. Data Storage: Apache Kafka® and ZooKeeper require externally mounted volumes to persist data in the event that a container stops running or is restarted.

  2. Security: When security is configured, the secrets are stored on the host and made available to the containers using mapped volumes.

  3. Configuring Connect with external JARs: Kafka Connect can be configured to use third-party jars by storing them on a volume on the host.

    Note

    If you need to add support for additional use cases for external volumes, see extending the images.

Data volumes for Kafka

Kafka uses volumes for log data and ZooKeeper uses volumes for transaction logs. You should separate volumes on the host for these services. You must also ensure that the host directory has read/write permissions for the Docker container user, which has root permissions by default unless you assigned a user using the Docker run command.

Note that when you map volumes from host, you must use full path (example: /var/lib/kafka/data).

The following example shows how to use Kafka and ZooKeeper with mounted volumes and how to configure volumes if you are running Docker container as non-root user. In this example, the containers run with the user appuser with UID=1000 and GID=1000. In all Confluent Platform images, the containers run with the appuser user.

For KRaft mode, you only need to mount a volume for Kafka since ZooKeeper is not running.

Important

As of Confluent Platform 7.5, ZooKeeper is deprecated for new deployments. Confluent recommends KRaft mode for new deployments. For more information, see KRaft Overview for Confluent Platform.

Prerequisite:

Create a cluster ID and format storage for your cluster, if you haven’t already. For instructions, see Generate and format IDs.

To mount an external volume for Kafka:

  1. On the Docker host (VirtualBox VM, for example), create the directory:

    # Create directory for Kafka data
mkdir -p /vol1/kafka-data

# Make sure the user has read and write permissions.
chown -R 1000:1000 /vol1/kafka-data

  2. Start the containers:

    docker run -d \
  --name=kafka-vols \
  --net=host \
  --user=1000 \
  -e KAFKA_NODE_ID=1 \
  -e KAFKA_LISTENER_SECURITY_PROTOCOL_MAP='CONTROLLER:PLAINTEXT,PLAINTEXT:PLAINTEXT,PLAINTEXT_HOST:PLAINTEXT' \
  -e KAFKA_ADVERTISED_LISTENERS='PLAINTEXT://kafka-vols:29092,PLAINTEXT_HOST://localhost:9092' \
  -e KAFKA_PROCESS_ROLES='broker,controller' \
  -e KAFKA_OFFSETS_TOPIC_REPLICATION_FACTOR=1 \
  -e KAFKA_CONTROLLER_QUORUM_VOTERS='1@kafka-vols:29093' \
  -e KAFKA_LISTENERS='PLAINTEXT://kafka-vols:29092,CONTROLLER://kafka-vols:29093,PLAINTEXT_HOST://0.0.0.0:9092' \
  -e KAFKA_INTER_BROKER_LISTENER_NAME='PLAINTEXT' \
  -e KAFKA_CONTROLLER_LISTENER_NAMES='CONTROLLER' \
  -e KAFKA_OFFSETS_TOPIC_REPLICATION_FACTOR=1 \
  -e CLUSTER_ID='MkU3OEVBNTcwNTJENDM2Qk' \
  -v /vol1/kafka-data:/var/lib/kafka/data \
  confluentinc/cp-kafka:7.6.3

    The data volumes are mounted using the -v flag.

Security: Data volumes for configuring secrets

When security is enabled, the secrets are made available to the containers using volumes. For example, if the host has the secrets (credentials, keytab, certificates, kerberos config, JAAS config) in /vol007/kafka-node-1-secrets, we can configure Kafka as follows to use the secrets:

docker run -d \
  --name=kafka-sasl-ssl-1 \
  --net=host \
  -e KAFKA_BROKER_ID=1 \
  -e KAFKA_ZOOKEEPER_CONNECT=localhost:22181,localhost:32181,localhost:42181/saslssl \
  -e KAFKA_ADVERTISED_LISTENERS=SASL_SSL://localhost:39094 \
  -e KAFKA_SSL_KEYSTORE_FILENAME=kafka.broker3.keystore.jks \
  -e KAFKA_SSL_KEYSTORE_CREDENTIALS=broker3_keystore_creds \
  -e KAFKA_SSL_KEY_CREDENTIALS=broker3_sslkey_creds \
  -e KAFKA_SSL_TRUSTSTORE_FILENAME=kafka.broker3.truststore.jks \
  -e KAFKA_SSL_TRUSTSTORE_CREDENTIALS=broker3_truststore_creds \
  -e KAFKA_SECURITY_INTER_BROKER_PROTOCOL=SASL_SSL \
  -e KAFKA_SASL_MECHANISM_INTER_BROKER_PROTOCOL=GSSAPI \
  -e KAFKA_SASL_ENABLED_MECHANISMS=GSSAPI \
  -e KAFKA_SASL_KERBEROS_SERVICE_NAME=kafka \
  -e KAFKA_OFFSETS_TOPIC_REPLICATION_FACTOR=1 \
  -e KAFKA_OPTS=-Djava.security.auth.login.config=/etc/kafka/secrets/host_broker3_jaas.conf -Djava.security.krb5.conf=/etc/kafka/secrets/host_krb.conf \
  -v /vol007/kafka-node-1-secrets:/etc/kafka/secrets \
  confluentinc/cp-kafka:latest

In the example above, the location of the data volumes is specified by setting -v /vol007/kafka-node-1-secrets:/etc/kafka/secrets. You then specify how they are to be used by setting:

-e KAFKA_OPTS=-Djava.security.auth.login.config=/etc/kafka/secrets/host_broker3_jaas.conf -Djava.security.krb5.conf=/etc/kafka/secrets/host_krb.conf

Configuring Connect with external JARs

Kafka Connect can be configured to use third-party jars by storing them on a volume on the host and mapping the volume to /etc/kafka-connect/jars on the container.

At the host (Virtualbox VM for example), download the MySQL driver:

# Create a dir for jars and download the mysql jdbc driver into the directories
mkdir -p /vol42/kafka-connect/jars

# get the driver and store the jar in the dir
curl -k -SL "https://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/Connector-J/mysql-connector-java-5.1.39.tar.gz" | tar -xzf - -C /vol42/kafka-connect/jars --strip-components=1 mysql-connector-java-5.1.39/mysql-connector-java-5.1.39-bin.jar

Then start Kafka Connect mounting the download directory as /etc/kafka-connect/jars:

docker run -d \
  --name=connect-host-json \
  --net=host \
  -e CONNECT_BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS=localhost:39092 \
  -e CONNECT_REST_PORT=28082 \
  -e CONNECT_GROUP_ID="default" \
  -e CONNECT_CONFIG_STORAGE_TOPIC="default.config" \
  -e CONNECT_OFFSET_STORAGE_TOPIC="default.offsets" \
  -e CONNECT_STATUS_STORAGE_TOPIC="default.status" \
  -e CONNECT_KEY_CONVERTER="org.apache.kafka.connect.json.JsonConverter" \
  -e CONNECT_VALUE_CONVERTER="org.apache.kafka.connect.json.JsonConverter" \
  -e CONNECT_INTERNAL_KEY_CONVERTER="org.apache.kafka.connect.json.JsonConverter" \
  -e CONNECT_INTERNAL_VALUE_CONVERTER="org.apache.kafka.connect.json.JsonConverter" \
  -e CONNECT_REST_ADVERTISED_HOST_NAME="localhost" \
  -e CONNECT_PLUGIN_PATH=/usr/share/java,/etc/kafka-connect/jars \
  -e KAFKA_OFFSETS_TOPIC_REPLICATION_FACTOR=1 \
  -v /vol42/kafka-connect/jars:/etc/kafka-connect/jars \
  confluentinc/cp-kafka-connect:latest

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