[HN Gopher] Show HN: Kowl - An Open Source WebUI for Apache Kafk...
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       Show HN: Kowl - An Open Source WebUI for Apache Kafka with a good
       UI and UX
        
       Author : weeco
       Score  : 127 points
       Date   : 2020-08-09 12:04 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | tspann wrote:
       | I use Streams Messenging Manager supports schema registry for
       | avro. Also includes alerts and many metrics and stats
        
       | mwaitjmp wrote:
       | This looks great. Does it support avro via the schema registry?
        
         | weeco wrote:
         | No it doesn't support avro yet, but this is being worked on and
         | we think this could be added in 1.2 already! I added a note
         | about the supported message formats in the readme.
        
         | bgorman wrote:
         | It would be great to have this info on the readme
        
       | jasonvorhe wrote:
       | This looks dope, I'll check it out after my vacation for our
       | Kafka clusters. I haven't yet found a decent web interface for
       | Kafka. For cluster overview there's cruise-control but apart from
       | that it all feels too messy and the UX is often more of an
       | afterthought. Thanks for doing this. I hope your enterprise
       | features provide you with sufficient revenue to keep this going.
       | If not, maybe offer a donation button somewhere?
        
         | weeco wrote:
         | We don't have any expectations or force to make money with
         | Kowl. Besides that we already use Kowl at our company where
         | engineers use it with joy in their daily business. We don't
         | only get valuable feedback from colleagues who use Kowl, but
         | our employer does also sponsor our efforts with working time.
         | If it ultimately turns out to be not profitable at all we will
         | simply open source everything I guess.
        
       | fourseventy wrote:
       | I was looking for something like this about a year ago but no
       | open source solution existed. Thank you!
        
         | pandemic_region wrote:
         | you must not have looked for long, most of the other OSS tools
         | mentioned in this thread exist for several years already.
        
       | mrweasel wrote:
       | Very nice, I think we'll give it a shot on our test cluster
       | tomorrow, we been looking for something like this, both for
       | ourself, but also for a customer.
        
       | tutfbhuf wrote:
       | Our company uses https://github.com/obsidiandynamics/kafdrop it's
       | FOSS. It can also handle AVRO and PROTOBUF messages.
        
         | pridkett wrote:
         | Does your company use both Avro and Protobuf for message
         | serialization? Most places tend to standardize with one or the
         | other and I'm wondering if there is a use case for both.
        
           | tutfbhuf wrote:
           | We use Avro only, just wanted to mention that Protobuf is
           | also supported.
        
           | chucky_z wrote:
           | I think if you use open source stuff you will find a lot of
           | Avro, like Debezium. Supporting both so you get best of in-
           | house and external makes sense to me.
        
       | mrorange27 wrote:
       | I will stick to using https://github.com/deviceinsight/kafkactl
       | in the shell.
        
         | jasonvorhe wrote:
         | This is amazing, thanks for pointing me to it. I googled around
         | for better tooling but apart from a few "playing around with
         | golang/rust"-cli tools I didn't find anything with better UX
         | than the abysmal shell script tooling provided with Kafka.
        
         | taf2 wrote:
         | Slightly off topic but for the shell in the example what did
         | they export PS1 to get the nice looking solid background color
         | for the host name and current working directory?
        
           | eat_veggies wrote:
           | Looks like some type of powerline plugin for their shell
           | 
           | https://github.com/b-ryan/powerline-shell
        
             | fwip wrote:
             | Yep, that's powerline (or an alternative inspired by) with
             | an improperly-patched font (which is why it's got the box
             | characters).
        
       | klden007 wrote:
       | I also can recommend https://github.com/tchiotludo/akhq for basic
       | Kafka management
        
       | abledon wrote:
       | CMAK, AKHQ, Kafdrop, Kowl, Conduktor, Kafkatool etc.... why are
       | there so many attempts to build a kafka UI? Does each one have
       | its own use case? I'd think that something as large as "Kafka" in
       | the software ecosystem would have a goto defacto standard UI for
       | managing it.
        
         | weeco wrote:
         | You are absolutely right, there are many options which we
         | looked at before we began with the project. None of existing
         | solutions provided the features we needed:
         | 
         | Authentication and authorization to meet our compliance needs,
         | a satisfactory UI/UX, message streaming with JavaScript filters
         | and a couple more features. We thought we can do better and
         | just started hacking something. There's a lot more to come.
         | I'll create a blog post describing in more detail why we've
         | created Kowl.
        
         | tutfbhuf wrote:
         | There are also many different UIs for kubernetes.
        
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       (page generated 2020-08-09 23:00 UTC)