Apache Kafka and supported platforms

Question

Basic question, which platforms and languages does Apache Kafka currently support?

Answer 1

Kafka is written in Scala, which means it runs on the JVM, so you can effectively run on any OS that supports the JVM. However, the brokers extract a huge performance boost by using the OS s kernel buffer cache. Im not sure how good this is with a non-unix system like Windows. The kafka source code base provides first class support for Scala and Java Clients . You could also find producer and consumer clients in languages like Php,C++, python etc under the contrib directory.

Answer 2

Apache Kafka runs well and is most stable and performant on Linux (either bare metal Linux, Linux VMs in private or public clouds, or Linux based docker containers). Kafka has been known to run on Windows but most vendors that commercially support Kafka do not extend their support to Windows for production servers so it's "community supported" by the Kafka community. Kafka also runs quite well on macOS for development.

The Apache Kafka distribution includes support for Java and Scala clients only but the larger Kafka community has created a long list of clients for other languages. A good list of the available options for clients is on the apache kafka wiki here: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/Clients

You will find that for some languages (like C#/.Net, Python, or Go) there are 2 or 3 or even more options for client libraries. Some are up to date with the newest Kafka wire protocol changes such as Exactly-Once Semantics, and message Headers which were added in Apache Kafka 0.11 or timestamps which were added in 0.10, or the security enhancements and new consumer api added in 0.9, and others are not. Some have the full set of functions/methods provided in Java (like seek(), or consumer group management, or interceptors) but others do not. Some are written purely in the target language and others are wrappers in the librdkafka C/C++ library. Some are commercially supported by a vendor and others are not, so choose based on your needs in terms of functionality, stability, execution environment, and supportability.