Running Kafka as a Native Binary Using GraalVM

During development and automated tests, it is common to create Kafka clusters from scratch and run workloads against those short-lived clusters. Starting a Kafka broker typically takes several seconds, and those seconds add up to precious time and resources.

How about spinning up a Kafka broker in less than 0.2 seconds with less memory overhead? In this session, we will talk about kafka-native, which leverages GraalVM native image for compiling Kafka broker to native executable using Quarkus framework. After going through some implementation details, we will focus on how it can be used in a Docker container with Testcontainers to speed up integration testing of Kafka applications. We will finally discuss some current caveats and future opportunities of a native-compiled Kafka for cloud-native production clusters.