Kafka - Capabilities and Limitations

Last updated January 19th, 2023

Objective

This page provides the technical capabilities and limitations of the Public Cloud Databases for Kafka offer.

We continuously improve our offers. You can follow and submit ideas to add to our roadmap at https://github.com/ovh/public-cloud-roadmap/projects/2.

Capabilities and limitations

Supported regions and multi-AZ

The Public Cloud Databases offer is available in the following regions:

• BHS (Beauharnois, Canada)
• DE (Frankfurt, Germany)
• GRA (Gravelines, France)
• SBG (Strasbourg, France)
• UK (London, United Kingdom)
• WAW (Warsaw, Poland)

Kafka nodes have to be in the same region. Multi-AZ is currently not supported.

Kafka versions

The Public Cloud Databases offer supports the following Kafka versions:

• Kafka 2.8
• Kafka 3.0

You can follow Kafka Release Cycle on their official page : https://kafka.apache.org/downloads

Kafka clients

You can use any of the Kafka-recommended clients to access your cluster.

Please note that Kafka Connect isn't available so far.

Plans

Three plans are available:

• Essential
• Business
• Enterprise

Here is an overview of the various plans' capabilities:

Plan	Number of nodes by default	Additional nodes
Business	3	No
Enterprise	6	No

Your choice of plan affects the number of nodes your cluster can run, the SLA, and a few other features such as read replicas or backup retention.

Nodes and replicas

• Business: The cluster is delivered with 3 nodes by default.
• Enterprise: The cluster is delivered with 6 nodes by default.

License type

Kafka software is under the Apache 2 license, a liberal open-source license. More information on https://github.com/apache/kafka/blob/trunk/LICENSE.

Hardware resources

Here are the node types you can choose from:

Business plans

Name	Disk (GB)	Cores	Memory (GB)
db1-7	960	2	7
db1-15	1920	4	15
db1-30	3840	8	30
db1-60	7680	16	60

Enterprise plans

Name	Disk (GB)	Cores	Memory (GB)
db1-7	1920	2	7
db1-15	3840	4	15
db1-30	7680	8	30
db1-60	15360	16	60

Right now, all nodes of a given cluster should be of the same type and distributed in the same region.

Disk type

The type of storage available may vary according to the region your cluster lives in: see Availability of Public Cloud products for more information about block storage type availability depending on region. Thus, your cluster may be backed by e.g. High Speed or High Speed Gen2 block storage.

Also, the performance caracteristics of the various storage offerings may vary depending on e.g. the storage size your cluster uses: High Speed may offer better iops than High Speed Gen2 for some disk sizes. See Block Storage documentation for more information about those performance caracteristics.

Public Cloud Databases will select the most efficient disk type for your cluster depending on your cluster parameters.

Features

Network

Kafka clusters are reachable through a random port, attributed during cluster creation. Once your cluster is in RUNNING status, the Service URI will display the port to use.

Public as well as private networking (vRack) can be used for all the offers.

Ingress and Egress traffic are included in the service plans and unmetered.

Private network considerations

Here are some considerations to take into account when using private network:

• Network ports are created in the private network of your choice. Thus, further operations on that network might be restricted - e.g. you won’t be able to delete the network if you didn’t stop the Public Cloud Databases services first.
• When connecting from outside subnet, Openstack IP gateway must be enabled in the subnet use for the Database service. The customer is responsible for any other custom network setup.

Maximum simultaneous connections

The number of simultaneous connections in Public Cloud Databases for Kafka depends on the available total memory on the node. We allow approximately 100 connections per 4 GB of RAM memory, capped to a maximum of 1000 active connections.

So for example on a server with 7 GB memory, you will get approximately 200 connections, and with 15 GB memory you will get 400 connections.

Advanced parameters

We do not currently support Kafka advanced parameters.

Backups

Kafka is a streaming tool. We don't backup Kafka data.

Logs and metrics

Logs and metrics are available via the OVHcloud Public Cloud Control Panel. As of today, you can't export logs and metrics, nor plug them into a remote tool.

• Logs retention: 1000 lines of logs
• Metrics retention: 1 calendar month

Please note that if the database instance is deleted, logs and metrics are also automatically deleted.

Users and roles

Creation of users is allowed via the Control Panel and API.

For each user you can specify a username. Role by default is admin.

Topics

Creation of topics is allowed via the Control Panel and API.

For each topic you can specify:

• A topic name;
• The replication factor;
• The amount of partitions;
• The size of partitions;
• The retention time;
• The minimum in-sync replication;
• The deletion policy.

We want your feedback!

We would love to help answer questions and appreciate any feedback you may have.

Are you on Discord? Connect to our channel at https://discord.gg/ovhcloud and interact directly with the team that builds our databases service!

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