Kafka training

Get your Kafka practice in hands-on exercises and demos

Structure of this repository

Folder kafka-exercises

In this folder you find exercises with some quests to solve.

Folder kafka-exercises-solutions

Here you find the solutions for the exercises.

Folder kafka-demos

In this folder you find demos to show how to use Kafka.

Folder resources

In this folder you find some resources to use in the exercises and demos in a central place.

Starting the environment

New users: run ./start.sh to start the local Kafka environment. This is the recommended entrypoint — it handles both docker-compose and docker compose automatically and supports optional add-on services.

# Minimal start: Kafka broker + Schema Registry only
./start.sh

# With a web UI (choose one)
./start.sh --ui akhq        # AKHQ  →  http://localhost:8089
./start.sh --ui redpanda    # Redpanda Console  →  http://localhost:8084
./start.sh --ui confluent   # Confluent Control Center  →  http://localhost:9021

# Full stack: all services + all UIs
./start.sh --full

# Help / all options
./start.sh --help

After startup, the script prints the active URLs for your current configuration.

To stop all services:

./stop.sh

Ports used

Service	Port	Profile
Kafka	9092	always on
Schema Registry	8081	always on
AKHQ	8089	--ui akhq
Redpanda Console	8084	--ui redpanda
Confluent Control Center	9021	--ui confluent
Kafka REST Proxy	8082	--full
Kafka Connect	8083	--full
KsqlDB Server	8088	--full
Elasticsearch	9200	--full
Kibana	5601	--full
Flink Dashboard	8090	--full
Crappy echo service	7980	exercise
Quarkus http server	7981	exercise
Quarkus test server	7982	exercise
Quarkus http server 2	7983	exercise
Quarkus test server 2	7984	exercise

Dependabot auto-merge

Dependabot PRs targeting the updates branch are auto-merged by GitHub Actions after the Build aggregator pull request run succeeds.

If a Dependabot PR changes files under .github/workflows/, the workflow needs a repository secret named DEPENDABOT_AUTOMERGE_TOKEN that contains a token with permission to update workflow files. Without that secret, non-workflow Dependabot PRs can still auto-merge, but workflow-changing PRs stay manual.