Development vs Production

There are unavoidable differences when working in dev (development and test environments) and production that may impact your work experience:

1. Karafka reload mode should not be used in production.
2. You should create all the topics you need upfront in your production Kafka cluster.
3. You should not use allow.auto.create.topics set to true in production.
4. Once you stabilize your topics list, you should consider locking it in the development. It is a common thing to make typos and forget about them.
5. Please consider that the topics created using allow.auto.create.topics always have only one partition. This is ok for development, but you should create more partitions upfront for the production environment.
6. Remember that rolling deployment of N processes will create N rebalances. This may affect performance and stability.
7. Creating the topic manually or by sending the first message and then starting a consumer is recommended. Karafka refreshes cluster metadata information, but it may take over five minutes to notice a new topic.
8. In the development the topic.metadata.refresh.interval.ms is set by default to 5 seconds. This means that a topic that did not exist the moment you started Karafka will be discovered fast. It is not recommended in production, and the default is 5 minutes.
9. It is recommended to use cooperative-sticky rebalance strategy via kafka partition.assignment.strategy for production.