At the time of writing, the stable version of Kafka is 0.9.x.
The prerequisites for running Kafka are a ZooKeeper ensemble and Java Version 1.7 or above. Kafka comes with a convenience script that can start a single node ZooKeeper but it is not recommended to use it in a production environment. We will be using the ZooKeeper cluster we deployed in Chapter 2, Storm Deployment, Topology Development, and Topology Options.
We will see how to set up a single node Kafka cluster first and then how to add two more nodes to it to run a full-fledged, three node Kafka cluster with replication enabled.
Following are the steps to set up a single node Kafka cluster:
- Download the Kafka 0.9.x binary distribution named
kafka_2.10-0.9.0.1.tar.gz
from http://apache.claz.org/kafka/0.9.0.1/kafka_2.10-0.9.0.1.tgz.
- Extract the archive to wherever you want to install Kafka with the following command:
tar -xvzf kafka_2.10-0.9.0.1.tgzcd kafka_2.10-0.9...