External access to Kafka using Strimzi - kubernetes

Question

I'm attempting to provide bi-direction external access to Kafka using Strimzi by following this guide: Red Hat Developer - Kafka in Kubernetes
My YAML taken from the Strimizi examples on GitHub, is as follows:
apiVersion: kafka.strimzi.io/v1beta2
kind: Kafka
metadata:
name: my-cluster
spec:
kafka:
version: 3.0.0
replicas: 1 #3
listeners:
- name: plain
port: 9092
type: internal
tls: false
- name: tls
port: 9093
type: internal
tls: true
- name: external
port: 9094
type: loadbalancer
tls: false
configuration:
#externalTrafficPolicy: Local
#loadBalancerSourceRanges:
# - 10.0.0.200/32
brokers:
- broker: 0
advertisedHost: 10.0.0.200
advertisedPort: 30123
config:
offsets.topic.replication.factor: 1 #3
transaction.state.log.replication.factor: 1 #3
transaction.state.log.min.isr: 1 #2
log.message.format.version: "3.0"
inter.broker.protocol.version: "3.0"
storage:
type: ephemeral
zookeeper:
replicas: 1 #3
storage:
type: ephemeral
entityOperator:
topicOperator: {}
userOperator: {}
When running kubectl get services I'm presented with the following:
NAME TYPE CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE
kubernetes ClusterIP 10.96.0.1 <none> 443/TCP 48m
my-cluster-kafka-0 LoadBalancer 10.107.190.96 <pending> 9094:31964/TCP 29m
my-cluster-kafka-bootstrap ClusterIP 10.99.34.246 <none> 9091/TCP,9092/TCP,9093/TCP 43m
my-cluster-kafka-brokers ClusterIP None <none> 9090/TCP,9091/TCP,9092/TCP,9093/TCP 43m
my-cluster-kafka-external-bootstrap LoadBalancer 10.99.91.68 <pending> 9094:31442/TCP 29m
my-cluster-zookeeper-client ClusterIP 10.101.216.35 <none> 2181/TCP 45m
my-cluster-zookeeper-nodes ClusterIP None <none> 2181/TCP,2888/TCP,3888/TCP 45m
Note the my-cluster-kafka-0 and my-cluster-kafka-external-bootstrap has a <pending> EXTERNAL-IP. What am I missing within my YAML file to provide bi-direction external access to my-cluster-kafka-0?

Answer 1

Strimzi just created the Kubernetes Service of type Loadbalancer. It is up to your Kubernetes cluster to provision the load balancer and set its external address which Strimzi can use. When the external address is listed as pending it means the load balancer is not (yet) created. In some public clouds that can take few minutes, so it might be just about waiting for it. But keep in mind that the load balancers are not supported in all environments => and when they are not supported, you cannot really use them. So you really need to double check whether your environment supports them or not. Typically, different clouds would support load balancers while some local or bare-metal environments might not (but it really depends).
I'm also not really sure why did you configured the advertised host and port:
advertisedHost: 10.0.0.200
advertisedPort: 30123
When using load balancers (assuming they would be supported in your environments), you would normally want to use the loadbalancer address which will be automatically set as the advertised host / port. Apart from that, your YAML looks good, but the loadbalancer support might be missing.