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Show HN: A native macOS client for Apache Kafka
- jitl 4y agoLooks great - beats the dependable but obscure CLI tools I’ve been using. Are you considering selling the app? If not, what about open sourcing it?
- Bogdanp 4y agoThanks! Yes, I plan to eventually sell it. I’m debating with myself between doing a shareware model where it’s perpetually free with the occasional nudges to buy a license or a more straight forward trial plus $30-50 license. Probably the latter would be more sustainable.
- sonicgear1 4y agoSeems like a neat little tool. I've always found Confluent Platform to be slow, clunky and overkill. Any plans for Windows?
- Bogdanp 4y agoYes, if this gains some traction then I’ll probably do a Windows version down the line.
- thom 4y agoCool, would be nice to see more competition for Conduktor. I have worked with a few “Kafka is a database” people in my career and even if you agree with them, it’s still a terrible one from a tooling perspective. Having to debug Kafka issues on topics with almost any volume of data is slow and frustrating, either with a GUI or command line/REPL tools. Your only hope (if you absolutely have to wrangle Kafka in the core of a project) is heavy testing with the test driver from the start and hoping to avoid getting into too many knots. It’s interesting to note that Conduktor’s more enterprisey features are in this area now.
- Bogdanp 4y ago> Having to debug Kafka issues on topics with almost any volume of data is slow and frustrating, either with a GUI or command line/REPL tools. Agreed. The scripting feature in Franz is born out of my frustration with some of this stuff and seems like a promising route for quickly visualizing and interacting with what’s happening on a topic (though it’s early days and I’ve got lots of work to do until it becomes truly useful).
- MuffinFlavored 4y agoi’d love to hear some Kafka as a database success/horror stories. What’s the general consensus?
- beebmam 4y agoIt works great with the right kind of data.
- dotancohen 4y agoWhat are the wrong kinds of data? It would be nice to know before I fall into a trap.
- dtech 4y agoIt works well with master data [1], i.e. semi-static data of limited volume that is widely needed throughout systems. Think physical store locations and such. Services can either store it in their own database and still get an update stream, or services can read the complete set on boot and keep it in memory. It can avoid the need for RPC/REST calls so centralized services that keep track off this kind of data, preventing cascading failures if those fail. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_data
- googletron 4y agoVery cool project! I wanted to listen to your video, but the microphone noise was too much. I hope you do a walk through of the code for this.
- Bogdanp 4y agoSorry about that! My audio recording skills are subpar. Yes, likely my next video will be a walkthrough of some of this code. I’ll do my best with the audio on that one.
- googletron 4y agoyeah just grab a cheap external microphone, it will do the trick! Keep up the awesome work.
- taspeotis 4y agoYou could try running it through Auphonic's free tier https://auphonic.com/pricing https://auphonic.com/pricing
- skunkworker 4y agoWill this support RedPanda out of the box?
- Bogdanp 4y agoI have yet to try RedPanda, but if it is API compatible with Kafka then it will work out of the box.
- alexandre_m 4y agoMost likely it will. At the same time, RedPanda provides a native command-line tool named "rpk" which works on macOS as well and which can manage topics and consumer groups. Which makes me think that not only would RedPanda users select this, but perhaps it's also a better generic CLI to talk to Kafka?
- xyst 4y agowhat kind of authentication mechanisms does it work with? We have an oauth and ldap backed cluster. This tool would be a nice drop in tool for diagnosing issues. Will try next week at work
- koukopoulos 4y agoAnother authentication option I'd be interested in is AWS MSK with IAM authentication.
- daverobbins1 4y agoI'd like to second this request. All of our Kafka clusters are in MSK with IAM auth. I've been desperately looking for another management tool to replace Conduktor (conduktor.io).
- Bogdanp 4y agoNoted! I'll probably work on this in the next month or so, along with a couple other suggestions I've received from folks.
- Bogdanp 4y agoCurrently, only SASL is supported since that's what's baked into the protocol, but I can look into supporting LDAP, too (pointers appreciated).
- shric 4y agoFranz is a fairly obvious name for a Kafka related tool/library so hopefully it won't get confused with https://github.com/twmb/franz-go https://github.com/twmb/franz-go
- BerislavLopac 4y agoI would personally go for something like "Samsa".
- rzzzt 4y agoIt is also the name of this multi-provider messaging app: https://meetfranz.com/ https://meetfranz.com/
- nikisweeting 4y agoYeah this is the one that's the most well known imo.
- hbbio 4y agoThere's even the same in Swift (just the library as in Go): https://github.com/kellanburket/franz https://github.com/kellanburket/franz That sounds even closer to home in that case!
- draven 4y agoI saw defn (Clojure) in the URL and thought about https://franz.com/ https://franz.com/ immediately.
- monocularvision 4y agoLove seeing folks create new native macOS apps. Thanks for this!
- pram 4y agoCan you manage ACLs through this? Anyway looks sweet, I’m going to try it on Monday at work. This is definitely something I’d pay for.
- Bogdanp 4y agoThanks! I’ll be adding acl support in the next few weeks.
- dpsych 4y agoWow! Just in time, can't wait to use this during work.
- pixel_tracing 4y agoIt would been great if this was pure swift + C that would have made this much more publicly usable. I get wanted to do cool things (and experiment in spare time) and admire the work but part does feel a missed opportunity too. Either way not my say so at the end this is your work and you should be proud of it :)
- Bogdanp 4y ago> It would been great if this was pure swift + C that would have made this much more publicly usable. Can you say more? I don’t follow what you mean by publicly usable here.
- jiqiren 4y agoOne problem I foresee is all my Kafka was behind layers of firewalls or restricted networks only accessible through jump hosts. In other words, to make this easier it might be a good idea to have a builtin ssh/(generic CMD) kind of way of opening streams.