Topic Policies

The topic policies-feature in gradient fox allows your organization to enforce consistent rules across topics in your Apache Kafka® clusters. Having topic policies provide a way to centrally control and enforce configuration rules for topics. They prevent creation of topics that violate naming or configuration standards. Having centralized topic policies help your organization maintain the following goals.

• Governance and Compliance - Helps maintain compliance with data governance frameworks
• Consistency and Standardization - Ensures consistent configurations across all topics, even if they’re created by different teams
• Protection from Misconfiguration - Prevents users from accidentally creating topics with unsafe or wasteful configuration
• Operational Safety and Efficiency - Makes cluster performance more predictable since topics follow controlled resource policies

You can configure the topic policies for a Kafka cluster under the Policies-tab.

Naming Policies

The naming policies section controls the naming rules for topics that are created in gradient fox. The rules do not apply to topics that are created using other methods, e.g. command line tools. You can configure the following rules for topic names.

• Minimum name length - The minimum number of characters that a topic name must have.
• Maximum name length - The maximum number of characters that a topic name can have.
• Name prefix - If specified, the topic name must start with this string.
• Name postfix - If specified, the topic name must end with this string.
• Allowed characters - Types of characters that a topic name can have. The types include lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numbers, dashes, dots and underscores.

Configuration Policies

The configuration policies section controls the configuration rules for topics that are created in gradient fox. The rules do not apply to topics that are created using other methods, e.g. command line tools. You can define the following configuration settings for topics.

• Minimum number of partitions - The minimum number of partitions that a topic must have.
• Maximum number of partitions - The maximum number of partitions that a topic can have.
• Minimum replication factor - The minimum replication factor that a topic must have.
• Maximum replication factor - The maximum replication factor that a topic can have.

Validation

When a new topic is created in gradient fox, the topic policy rules are evaluated against it. In case there are aspects that violate the policies, the user is presented with an error such as the one below and the topic creation is prevented.