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Broker types

Cluster administrators can set the default broker implementation for a cluster. When you create a broker, the default broker implementation is used, unless you provide set configurations in the Broker object.

Default broker implementation for development purposes

Knative provides a default, channel-based broker implementation. This channel-based broker can be used for development and testing purposes, but does not provide adequate event delivery guarantees for production environments. The default broker is backed by the InMemoryChannel channel implementation by default.

If you want to use Apache Kafka to reduce network hops, use the Knative broker implementation for Apache Kafka. Do not configure the channel-based broker to be backed by the KafkaChannel channel implementation.

Production-ready Knative broker implementation for Apache Kafka

For production-ready Knative Eventing deployments, Red Hat recommends using the Knative broker implementation for Apache Kafka. The broker is an Apache Kafka native implementation of the Knative broker, which sends CloudEvents directly to the Kafka instance.

The Knative broker has a native integration with Kafka for storing and routing events. This allows better integration with Kafka for the broker and trigger model over other broker types, and reduces network hops. Other benefits of the Knative broker implementation include:

  • At-least-once delivery guarantees

  • Ordered delivery of events, based on the CloudEvents partitioning extension

  • Control plane high availability

  • A horizontally scalable data plane

The Knative broker implementation for Apache Kafka stores incoming CloudEvents as Kafka records, using the binary content mode. This means that all CloudEvent attributes and extensions are mapped as headers on the Kafka record, while the data spec of the CloudEvent corresponds to the value of the Kafka record.