Production considerations

Alpakka Kafka API

Do not use Consumer.atMostOnceSource in production as it internally commits the offset after every element.
If you create Producer sinks in “inner flows”, be sure to share the Producer instance. This avoids the expensive creation of KafkaProducer instances.

Note

This is just a start, please add your experiences to this list by opening a Pull Request.

Monitoring

For performance monitoring consider Lightbend Telemetry which gives insights into Akka and Akka Streams.

Security setup

Configure the Kafka brokers as described in Confluent’s article “Configuring Kafka Clients”.

For Alpakka Kafka the client configuration parameters go in the akka.kafka.consumer.kafka-clients and akka.kafka.producer.kafka-clients sections of the configuration.

akka.kafka.producer {
  kafka-clients {
   security.protocol=SSL
   ssl.truststore.location=/var/private/ssl/kafka.client.truststore.jks
   ssl.truststore.password=test1234
   ssl.keystore.location=/var/private/ssl/kafka.client.keystore.jks
   ssl.keystore.password=test1234
   ssl.key.password=test1234
  }
}

The truststore and keystore locations may specify URLs, absolute paths or relative paths (starting with ./).

You have the option to pass the passwords as command line parameters or environment values via the support in Config.