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I know Java services love Linux/Unix hosts much more. However, there are indeed some scenarios where it's not always feasible to let customer install a Linux cluster in their environment just to deploy Kafka, i.e. Windows 10 / Windows Server may be their only acceptable choice.

To describle our application briefly: not a service running constantly, we just want to introduce Kafka as a reliable communication broker to exchange data among quite a few different distributed processes (on different machines in the network, probably including some machines on the cloud) when a certain operation starts and runs for a variable duration, say, from 1 hour up to 48 hours. Each run will create many temporary topics.

In such cases, is Kafka on windows a production option?

BTW, I encountered quite a few known issues for Kafka on windows, e.g. this one. For this specific issue, We simply assume there will someone in the customer company, or some scheduled script will be available and respsonbile for cleaning up the out-dated topics from the logs, say, topics from one month ago. Is there any other unsolvable road blockers to use Kafka on Windows? Any thoughts or comments are appreciated.

tedyyu
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Is it an option? Yes. Is it a sensible option? … perhaps not.

As you've identified, there are several known issues with running Kafka on Windows. There are workarounds etc etc, but do you really want to be dealing with those in Production? It's one thing to run a hack to get your sandbox to work, but if you've got production workloads, quite another.

Here is one option if you really want to run Kafka on Windows - do so using WSL2.

Robin Moffatt
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