Configure MirrorMaker 2 for active-active bidirectional replication between two Kafka clusters with cycle prevention

domain: kafka.apache.org · 6 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
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Steps

  1. In mm2.properties define both clusters: clusters = dc1, dc2 with dc1.bootstrap.servers and dc2.bootstrap.servers; enable dc1->dc2 and dc2->dc1 replication flows
  2. Set replication.policy.class=org.apache.kafka.connect.mirror.IdentityReplicationPolicy only if topic namespacing is managed externally; otherwise use DefaultReplicationPolicy which prefixes topics with source cluster alias to prevent cycles
  3. Configure heartbeats.topic.replication.factor=1 and checkpoints.topic.replication.factor=1 for internal MM2 topics; set replication.factor=3 for data topics
  4. Enable offset translation by setting emit.checkpoints.enabled=true and sync.group.offsets.enabled=true so consumers can failover between clusters with accurate positions
  5. Set topics.exclude to block replication of MM2 internal topics (heartbeats, checkpoints, offset-syncs) back across the link
  6. Deploy as a Kafka Connect distributed cluster on each side; monitor lag using the MirrorHeartbeatConnector latency metric

Known gotchas

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