How to Remove Apache Kafka Brokers the Easy Way
May 3, 2022Stanislav Kozlovski

Summary
Introduces the ability to safely remove multiple Kafka brokers with a single command, addressing previous limitations of removing only one broker at a time and the risk of under-replicated partitions. Details the use of Confluent's Self-Balancing Clusters for intelligent partition reassignment and bin-packing, operation persistence using a state machine and a Kafka topic for resilience, preliminary validations to prevent capacity issues, and a new Broker Replica Exclusion API to handle race conditions with new topic creations.