Right deployment to provide access to external customers

[rikirolly]

Hello everyone,

I'm new to Redpanda and even newer to Kafka streams. Despite having read some documentation, I'm left with a question: What are the best practices for granting access to external producers, specifically our customers? My deployment is on Kubernetes, and I was considering providing a specific URL for broker access. However, I aim to avoid changing this URL due to broker issues.

Could this case be managed by using NodePort, as suggested in the documentation?
Does Kubernetes automatically handle this scenario, or would I need to use the Redpanda HTTP Proxy?

I appreciate any advice or suggestions.

Thank you,
Riccardo

[rockwotj]

Hi @rikirolly sorry for the slow reply, it depends on what interface you want to give to your customers. If you want them to use the HTTP API you can certainly expose our Pandaproxy over a load balancer, otherwise generally you'll have to expose node port, as the kafka protocol requires that each clients can connect directly to each broker

[rockwotj]

Also see this discussion as well: #7889