Create a Kafka Cluster with Azure Kubernetes Service

Create a Kafka cluster with external access with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

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In this article, we’ll demonstrate to create an Apache Kafka cluster with Azure Kubernetes Service. We’ll also ensure the external applications not running in the AKS cluster can also access the Kafka topics.

Creating the K8s cluster with Azure Kubernetes Service

Let us first create a two node Kubernetes (K8s) cluster with AKS. Browse to Kubernetes Serviecs page in the Azure console and click on Create a Kubernetes cluster link:

Create a Kubernetes Cluster

Next, create a new resource group and select the other parameters such as region, node types etc.:

Creating a Resource Group

Next, configure the Node pools based on your specific need or go ahead with the default one as shown below. Once done, click on the Review + create button. This takes a while to create the cluster:

Configuring Node pools

Once the Azure Kubernetes Cluster is ready, click on the Connect link as shown below:

You’ll find the Azure CLI commands to connect to the Kubernetes cluster from your local machine:

Connecting to K8s

Connecting to Kubernetes (K8s) cluster from Local Machine

This section requires Azure CLI to be installed on the local machine. You can find relevant instructions to install Azure CLI available at…