This playbook will install confluent kafka into 3 cluster nodes. Each node will contain one kafka broker and one zookeeper instance and all of them are synchronized.

For the installation, I will use kafka from https://www.confluent.io, or for more clarity I will call it as confluent kafka. The confluent itself provides two version, enterprise and open source. This playbook will use the latter version, which is an open source one.

Note: this playbook only works in Redhat/CentOS 7

The playbook only contains one role, which is confluent-kafka. Basically this roles will install and configure 4 services:

• Zookeeper
• Apache Kafka
• Schema Registry
• REST Proxy

The roles itself will automatically install open-jdk-8 as well. You can disable the java installation, if you already installed JDK in your target machine, by setting variable java_install into false inside roles/confluent-kafka/defaults/main.yml.

Because some setup need to be align with properties configuration, there are some tricks to get all hosts into ansible variables. For example, in server.properties there are some configuration to list all zookeeper instances. To address this configuration challanges, I set up a group called kafka_broker_nodes, which contains the 3 nodes to be configured.

Please take a note with ansible_host variable that are listed in all nodes. This variable values will be used by the playbook to be manipulated via Jinja filter. Therefore, we can trick the properties configuration for all the services.

 // make sure you point to the correct host. See hosts files.
 ansible-playbook site.yml -i hosts_local

https://docs.confluent.io/current/installation/installing_cp.html