Usage of Strimzi 0.45.0 in production

[ravishankarsr82]

Hi,

I want to understand if Strimzi 0.45.0 is production ready. The reason I'm asking this question is because in all the Strimzi CRDs I see v1beta2 as version name in customresourcedefinition.spec.versions. Is there any risk to use 0.45.0 in production deployments? And are there any plans for GA version in near future?

Please let me know. Thanks.

[ppatierno]

Strimzi has been production ready since years now. You can see all the adopters we have using it in production environment. And these are just the ones who decided to be in the list but the are even more out there (looking at the community) using it. The fact that CRDs are still v1beta2 is because we decided that the move to v1 should have happened when ZK was removed. Now that ZK is going away with only KRaft support, we'll plan to move to v1 but it's not an easy plan and will not happen shortly. In any case, you can already use Strimzi in production.

[ravishankarsr82]

Ok, thanks a lot for your reply.

[zohebk8s]

@ppatierno @scholzj I was about to ask the same question about Production readiness. It's good to know that Strimzi is being used worldwide. The only question is, how about Kraft implementation in production?

As we plan to Implement or use Strimzi in production, and immediately after using I don't want to migrate again to Kraft. Just thinking of reducing operational overhead. So should we start with Zookeeper for now or we can use Kraft if it's production ready?

[scholzj]

Kafka 4.0 is almost out (RC0 is available)

@ppatierno Please keep in mind that the RC0 is not really a release candidate as there are many known blockers and there is no real voting on its release planned

[zohebk8s]

@ppatierno @scholzj Thanks a lot for sharing valuable information.

For a greenfield financial project, this approach looks sensible to me:

1. Start with Strimzi 0.45.0 using Zookeeper mode preferring the most battle-tested configuration
2. Plan for migration to KRaft in the roadmap (perhaps 3-6 months later) once we have Kafka 4.0 & Strimzi without Zookeeper
3. Set up a comprehensive test/staging environment where you can practice the migration process

[scholzj]

Keep in mind that the migration will always happen to/with Strimzi 0.45 and Kafka 3.9.0. That is how the Apache Kafka project designed it. So however long you wait, you will always migrate with Kafka 3.9 first.

[ppatierno]

Yeah so after that you will need to move from 3.9 to some 4.x (depending when you run the migration) with a newer Strimzi version.

[zohebk8s]

Assuming Current State as: Strimzi 0.45.0 & Kafka 3.9.0

Once Kraft in enabled from both Strimzi/Kafka. Then migrate to Strimzi 0.46.0 & Kafka 4.0

Hope my understanding is correct