Re: Kafka on IBM i

Shinier objects meaning moved on to other projects so I didn't spend any more time working with running a Kafka server on IBMi.

Most shops would probably run Kafka somewhere other than IBMi because of the complexity of setting up a fault tolerant environment for Kafka.

You should probably see if you can find any other shops in the LUG that are using Kafka on IBMi or other platforms. (Your current employer could be a member of LUG if I recall correctly.)

Most are using it somewhere else and just interfacing and feeding it as a client from IBMi.

This google query provided some decent insight to Kafka: "best place to run kafka for production usage"

Regards,
Richard Schoen
Web: http://www.richardschoen.net
Email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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message: 1
date: Sat, 21 Jun 2025 22:42:05 -0400
from: Jay Vaughn <jeffersonvaughn@xxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: Kafka on IBM i

Hi Richard.

The idea is to move more towards a pub/sub architecture at our company.
I have no specific use cases unfortunately.

I would think there is no reason it cannot run on IBM i.

Why would you consider those objects shinier?

Jay

On Jun 21, 2025, at 10:29?AM, Richard Schoen <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

?I got about as far as you did and moved on to shinier objects.

More important question would be? What?s your use case ? What do you plan to use Kafka for ?

If it?s queueing transactions, there are also tools such as:
-Data Queues
-ActiveMQ
-IBMMQ

And probably other tools to process incoming and outgoing transactions.

Most Kafka servers I have seen are running in the cloud or on Kubernetes clusters.

Regards,
Richard Schoen
Web: http://www.richardschoen.net
Email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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message: 1
date: Fri, 20 Jun 2025 21:18:13 -0400
from: Jay Vaughn <jeffersonvaughn@xxxxxxxxx>
subject: Kafka on IBM i

Is there anyone here that has Kafka installed and running on IBM I and serving native applications such as RPG and or COBOL?

The only reference I can find at all close to IBM I architecture is on ibm i oss yet it only explains how to install. Much less configure and utilize from a native standpoint.
And when I say native I?m talking about traditional ibm i architecture relevant typical of iseries and AS/400.
Not PASE and open source although I realize this is the area where Kafka runs.

We?ve managed to download and install and get a Kafka server up and running but not much more.

I do also have a consumer api using db2 sql http_post to stream some data to the server and the server.log does log this activity when it?s invoked but sadly in the form of an error msg. I picked this api example up in the past in which I honestly cannot even recall from where. I?m guessing Jesse G?s GitHub but I cannot find it on there presently.

We have no idea where to go to get this working.

Any suggestions or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Jay V

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message: 2
date: Sat, 21 Jun 2025 12:49:33 +0300
from: Alexei Baranov <alexei.baranov@xxxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: Kafka on IBM i

Hi Jay,

I used to play with kafka, ported librdkafka library to IBMi, see here: https://github.com/AlexeiBaranov/librdkafka. One of our customers uses kafka in production environment. The kafka server itself is on a Linux cluster next to IBMi. Native RPGLE clients and consumers run on IBMi, using librdkafka library - they use my port, although they themselves have already updated library to the latest version.

Regards,
Alexei