Native C# client for Apache Kafka.

Copyright 2014, James Roland under Apache License, V2.0. See LICENSE file.

This project is a .NET implementation of the Apache Kafka protocol. The wire protocol portion is based on the kafka-python library writen by David Arthur and the general class layout attempts to follow a similar pattern as his project. To that end, this project builds up from the low level KafkaConnection object for handling async requests to/from the kafka server, all the way up to a higher level Producer/Consumer classes.

var options = new KafkaOptions(new Uri("http://SERVER1:9092"), new Uri("http://SERVER2:9092"));
var router = new BrokerRouter(options);
var client = new Producer(router);

client.SendMessageAsync("TestHarness", new[] { new Message("hello world")}).Wait();

using (client) { }

var options = new KafkaOptions(new Uri("http://SERVER1:9092"), new Uri("http://SERVER2:9092"));
var router = new BrokerRouter(options);
var consumer = new Consumer(new ConsumerOptions("TestHarness", router));

//Consume returns a blocking IEnumerable (ie: never ending stream)
foreach (var message in consumer.Consume())
{
    Console.WriteLine("Response: P{0},O{1} : {2}", 
        message.Meta.PartitionId, message.Meta.Offset, message.Value);  
}

The TestHarness project is a simple example console application that will read messages from a kafka server and write them to the screen. It will also take anything typed in the console and send this as a message to the kafka servers.

Simply modify the kafka server Uri in the code to point to a functioning test server.

The protocol has been divided up into concrete classes for each request/response pair. Each class knows how to encode and decode itself into/from their appropriate Kafka protocol byte array. One benefit of this is that it allows for a nice generic send method on the KafkaConnection.

Provides async methods on a persistent connection to a kafka broker (server). The send method uses the TcpClient send async function and the read stream has a dedicated thread which uses the correlation Id to match send responses to the correct request.

Provides metadata based routing of messages to the correct Kafka partition. This class also manages the multiple KafkaConnections for each Kafka server returned by the broker section in the metadata response. Routing logic is provided by the IPartitionSelector.

Provides the logic for routing which partition the BrokerRouter should choose. The default selector is the DefaultPartitionSelector which will use round robin partition selection if the key property on the message is null and a mod/hash of the key value if present.

Provides a higher level class which uses the combination of the BrokerRouter and KafkaConnection to send batches of messages to a Kafka broker.

Provides a higher level class which will consume messages from a whitelist of partitions from a single topic. The consumption mechanism is a blocking IEnumerable of messages. If no whitelist is provided then all partitions will be consumed creating one KafkaConnection for each partition leader.

The current version of this project is a functioning "work in progress" as it was only started in early February. The wire protocol is complete except for Offset Commits to the servers (as there is a bug in 0.8.0 which prevents testing of this feature). The library is functioning in that there is a complete Producer and Consumer class thus messages can pass to and from a Kafka server.

• Better handling of options for providing customization of internal behaviour of the base API. (right now the classes pass around option parameters)
• General structure of the classes is not finalized and breaking changes will occur.
• Only Gzip compression is implemented, snappy on the todo.
• Currently only works with .NET Framework 4.5 as it uses the await command.
• Test coverage.
• Documentation.

This is a pet project for me and is not currently backed by a need for a Kafka server client. Which means the client is only currently being tested against a small set of Kafka test servers and not against any server that has any real data load.