How to Manage Kafka Users in a Database Cluster

Kafka is an open-source distributed event and stream-processing platform built to process demanding real-time data feeds. It is inherently scalable, with high throughput and availability.

Kafka clusters come configured with a default administrative user (doadmin). This default is necessary for cluster administration, so you can’t delete it, but you can add additional users.

By default, every database cluster is publicly accessible. To natively limit access, you can add trusted sources.

To add or delete users to a database cluster, click the name of the database to go to its Overview page, then select the Users & Topics tab.

Create new users in the Users section by entering a name in the Add new user field, changing their general permissions for all Topics in your cluster, and clicking Save. You can choose one of the following permissions:

• Admin: This user can manage Topics, as well as write data to and read data from all Topics in the cluster.
• Produce: This user can write new data to all Topics in the cluster.
• Consume: This user can read data from all Topics in the cluster.
• Consume and Produce: This user can both write and read data from all Topics in the cluster.

You can also delete a user in this page by clicking the … icon to the right of the user, clicking Delete, and then confirming the deletion. Similarly, to reset a user’s password, open the user’s More menu and select Reset password.