entity-operator and kafka-exporter questions - after upgrade to 0.29.0 using Kafka 3.1.0

[BBQigniter]

Hi,

I recently tried the upgrade on one of our lab-clusters and it worked fine and was straight forward :) - only one thing is a little bit confusing for me. Before and after the upgrade the Kafka and Zookeeper images are still version 3.1.0 as it should be and the statefulsets are using the 0.29.0 images. But the entity-operator and kafka-exporter are suddenly using the 0.29.0's version 3.2.0 images.

• Is this normal behavior?
• Will this create any issues if there is a version mismatch?
  • If so how can I tell the cluster-operator to also use the same version for the entitiy-operator and kafka-exporter for a cluster?
    In the documentation https://strimzi.io/docs/operators/latest/configuring.html#type-KafkaClusterSpec-schema-reference I can see that version is available (and in our cluster-config yaml I also use it) but in https://strimzi.io/docs/operators/latest/configuring.html#type-EntityOperatorSpec-reference and https://strimzi.io/docs/operators/latest/configuring.html#type-KafkaExporterSpec-reference I couldn't find something similar.
    Snippet from my cluster-yaml I use

    apiVersion: kafka.strimzi.io/v1beta2
    kind: Kafka
    metadata:
      name: kafka-lab
      namespace: kafka-lab
    spec:
      kafka:
        version: 3.1.0
    ...
      entityOperator:
        # if {} - default values are used
        # if completely removed - those operator are not used at all
        # see https://strimzi.io/docs/operators/latest/configuring.html#assembly-kafka-entity-operator-str
        topicOperator: {}
        userOperator: {}
      kafkaExporter: {}
    ...
    

Thanks for help in advance :)

[scholzj]

Yes, the Kafka Exporter, Cruise Control or the Entity Operator have no dependence on the actual Kafka version. They just use the another software from the Kafka image (not Kafka itself). So they always use the image with the default Kafka version (normally the latest version). Even if you get it to use the other Kafka image, the result will be exactl the same since the software (e.g. stunnel or Kafka Exporter) are exactly the same in all the Kafka images.

[BBQigniter]

oh, nice. Thanks for clarification!