Description

The operator creates configuration files for Kafka servers (brokers and controllers) but no configuration files for CLI clients shipped with the Kafka image and running within the Kubernetes cluster.

This makes it extremely tedious to inspect, debug and manage the state of the Kafka cluster/topics/quorum etc.

Users need to manually create client.properties files with the appropriate connection configuration (ssl, trustore, etc.) to be able to use CLI tools like kafka-topics.sh or kafka-metadata-quorum.sh.

To improve the quality of life and reduce operation costs for developers, admins and users, the Kafka operator should automatically generate the client as well as the server configuration and make it available on all Kafka pods.

Update: Also create log4j[2].properties files specifically for clients, where the root log level is set to WARN (or maybe even ERROR).
It turns out that clients and servers share the same logging infrastructure so it's not possible to make the clients log in a different way without modifying them. I decided this is not worth the effort.

Tasks

• Re-add demo guide that was removed in chore: update demos to Kafka 4 demos#313