sarama VS Confluent Kafka Golang Client

Note: Since there are multiple Go clients for Kafka (including Sarama), please make sure to consult their client documentation to confirm whether they support IAM authentication.

You might want to gradually replace that one with https://github.com/twmb/franz-go because Shopify is looking to find a new owner for Sarama and, until or if they do, it seems to be falling behind with maintenance: https://github.com/Shopify/sarama/issues/2461 For example, they still haven’t addressed this breaking change https://github.com/Shopify/sarama/issues/2358. franz-go has worked well so far in Benthos https://github.com/benthosdev/benthos/tree/main/internal/impl/kafka and it will likely end up as the only implementation once the Sarama-based one will be deprecated

I've used mainly sarama wrapped with a bit of bespoke helper libraries. Never really looked into others, just grabbed one that was actively maintained and went for it.

Well, as someone who reviews a lot of code, I don't like seeing 100s of little files when a handful of logically grouped files would do. For example, this popular go project: https://github.com/Shopify/sarama is currently 256 small .go files, largely following a one class/file rule.

The first example is something we ran into while working on a project. Up until recently, the sarama library (Go library for Apache Kafka) contained the following piece of code (at sarama/version.go):

Im using the go sarama library to connect to the cluster, using this basic example.

If you find the kafka input slow, try kafka_franz. It might be a bit faster, since it’s based on https://github.com/twmb/franz-go. The kafka one is based on https://github.com/Shopify/sarama. You can also write a custom input based on https://github.com/confluentinc/confluent-kafka-go, but this library relies on CGo, which can be annoying.

There are a few factors that are stopping me from using kafka-go over Shopify's sarama.

There are two main libraries that people use to write clients Confluent Kafka and segment io kafka

As my first "real world" (ish) project in Vlang, I'm trying to copy https://github.com/confluentinc/confluent-kafka-go, which is a Go wrapper for Kafka C client library, https://github.com/edenhill/librdkafka

You are right, but in practice that's not what happens. Companies do not rely on open source libraries, the developers working for such companies do.

I can give you a realistic example. If you want to use Kafka and Go, your probably only option is to use https://github.com/confluentinc/confluent-kafka-go. Its LICENSE explicitly says "no warranty". Now, what if I find a bug in the library? Only two realistic solutions from my side:

1. I submit the issue and hope for the maintainers to fix it

2. I dig deeper and try to fix the issue. I submit the PR

None of the above scenarios are guaranteed to have a happy ending. The issue could be ignored, or piled up among thousand of other (maybe higher prio) issues. My solution may not be optimal and could be rejected (or if it's optimal, nobody is taking a look at it, and it could remain open for weeks/months).

> If that is a problem for you, negotiate a different contract up front - with the maintainer or someone else willing to do the work. That probably means paying them.

In the real world that would mean that I go to my manager and asks them to pay money to the maintainers of confluent-kafka-go to fix the issue I found. I don't think my manager would approve that, but let's imagine he does. The guys at confluent-kafka-go may not want money to fix the issue. These guys have probably already jobs that pay them well, and they work on the library at will.

Note: I'm talking about confluent-kafka-go, which I know is behind the Confluent software company. But I could as well be talking about libraries maintained by individuals like https://github.com/edenhill/librdkafka

it can be completely statically linked binaries. example: https://github.com/confluentinc/confluent-kafka-go/blob/db57ef6235/kafka/librdkafka_vendor/README.md

If you find the kafka input slow, try kafka_franz. It might be a bit faster, since it’s based on https://github.com/twmb/franz-go. The kafka one is based on https://github.com/Shopify/sarama. You can also write a custom input based on https://github.com/confluentinc/confluent-kafka-go, but this library relies on CGo, which can be annoying.

Last time I checked Confluent does not have a Schema Registry for Go, only for Java, so instead of that I rely on using the guidelines defined for the serialized data, specifically I've used gPRC+Protobuf for doing this, together with buf to detect breaking changes; buf has their own schema registry perhaps that could be something you could explore as well.

So, in the interests of full transparency - we at Zendesk are actually running a fork of confluent-kafka-go, which I forked to add, amongst other things, context support: https://github.com/confluentinc/confluent-kafka-go/pull/626

This bug actually happened because I mis-merged upstream into our fork and missed an important call to rd_kafka_poll_set_consumer: https://github.com/zendesk/confluent-kafka-go/commit/6e2d889...

Setup Kafka Producer using confluent-kakfka-go

I'd suggest https://github.com/confluentinc/confluent-kafka-go we switched from sarama-cluster with minimal work and it works fine. And we process approx 1.2M messages per hour.

In my company we use this https://github.com/confluentinc/confluent-kafka-go,