Simulate Kafka Faults

This guide describes how to inject Kafka faults on physical machines with PhysicalMachineChaos in Chaos Mesh.

Requirements

Version support

The Kafka fault configurations in this guide require Chaos Mesh 2.8.8 or later, with Chaosd v1.6.0 or later running on the target machines.

For deployment instructions and target machine configuration, see Simulate faults on physical machines.

Configuration

Set spec.action to kafka-fill, kafka-flood, or kafka-io, and place the fault parameters in the matching configuration block. For example, parameters for kafka-io belong in spec.kafka-io.

All three actions require the Kafka broker's host and port, and the target topic. The port must be greater than 0. If the broker requires authentication, also set username, password, and authMechanism. The supported mechanisms are sasl/plain, sasl/scram-sha-256, and sasl/scram-sha-512. If you set username, you must also set authMechanism.

Each action also requires the following configuration.

Action	Additional required configuration
kafka-fill	messageSize specifies the number of bytes per message and must be greater than 0. maxBytes must also be greater than 0. Set reloadCommand to the command that reloads the Kafka configuration, and configFile to an existing broker configuration file on the Chaosd machine.
kafka-flood	messageSize specifies the number of bytes per message and must be greater than 0. threads specifies the number of worker threads and must also be greater than 0.
kafka-io	configFile must point to an existing broker configuration file on the Chaosd machine. Set at least one of nonReadable or nonWritable to true.

Example

The following example uses kafka-io to remove write permissions from the target topic's partition directories and log files. Before using it, replace the namespace and PhysicalMachine name under selector.physicalMachines, the broker address, credentials, and configuration file path with your values.

apiVersion: chaos-mesh.org/v1alpha1
kind: PhysicalMachineChaos
metadata:
  name: physical-kafka-io
  namespace: chaos-mesh
spec:
  action: kafka-io
  mode: one
  selector:
    physicalMachines:
      default:
        - kafka-host
  kafka-io:
    topic: test-topic
    host: 192.168.0.20
    port: 9092
    username: chaos-user
    password: replace-with-password
    authMechanism: sasl/plain
    configFile: /opt/kafka/config/server.properties
    nonWritable: true
  duration: '30s'