Replicating Data Between Two Kafka Clusters

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Replicating Data Between Two Kafka Clusters

Kafka can be deployed in mutliple data centers in an "Active-Active", "Active-Passive", or centralized architecture. In this hands-on lab, we simulate an active-passive architecture in which data from one cluster is replicated to another cluster using a tool called Replicator. Replicator, like MirrorMaker, allows you to preserve topic configuration in the source cluster while replicating the messages from one cluster to another.

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Lab Info

Level

Intermediate

Last updated

Sep 10, 2025

Duration

1h 45m

Challenge

Start the Destination Cluster
Note: After connecting via ssh, please give the lab extra time to finish provisioning. If you get a dpkg frontend lock message when running sudo apt install -y default-jdk, please give the lab more time before retrying the command.

Start Zookeeper.
```
bin/zookeeper-server-start etc/kafka/zookeeper.properties
```
Start Kafka.
```
bin/kafka-server-start etc/kafka/server.properties
```

Challenge

Start the Origin Cluster

Make a copy of the configuration files.

cp etc/kafka/zookeeper.properties /tmp/zookeeper_origin.properties
cp etc/kafka/server.properties /tmp/server_origin.properties

Change the port numbers for the origin cluster.

sed -i -e "s/2181/2171/g" /tmp/zookeeper_origin.properties
sed -i -e "s/9092/9082/g" /tmp/server_origin.properties
sed -i -e "s/2181/2171/g" /tmp/server_origin.properties
sed -i -e "s/#listen/listen/g" /tmp/server_origin.properties

Change the data directory for the origin cluster.

sed -i -e "s/zookeeper/zookeeper_origin/g" /tmp/zookeeper_origin.properties
sed -i -e "s/kafka-logs/kafka-logs-origin/g" /tmp/server_origin.properties

Start Zookeeper.

bin/zookeeper-server-start /tmp/zookeeper_origin.properties

Start Kafka.

bin/kafka-server-start /tmp/server_origin.properties

Challenge

Create a Topic in the Source Cluster
Create a topic named test-topic with 1 partition and a replication factor of 1.
```
bin/kafka-topics --create --topic test-topic --replication-factor 1 --partitions 1 --zookeeper localhost:2171
```

Challenge

Run the Replicator Tool

Run Kafka Connect in Standalone Mode and pass in the quickstart-replicator.properties file

bin/connect-standalone etc/kafka/connect-standalone.properties etc/kafka-connect-replicator/quickstart-replicator.properties

Challenge

Produce and Verify Replication

Verify that the topic was replicated to the destination cluster.

bin/kafka-topics --describe --topic test-topic.replica --zookeeper localhost:2181

Open a Console Producer and write to the topic test-topic in the source cluster.

seq 10000 | bin/kafka-console-producer --topic test-topic --broker-list localhost:9082

Confirm the messages were replicated by opening a console consumer to the destination cluster.

bin/kafka-console-consumer --from-beginning --topic test-topic.replica --bootstrap-server localhost:9092

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