---
title: "Kafka Protocol Support"
slug: "kafka-protocol-support-tg"
tags: ["5.4"]
updated: 2026-10-28T01:54:33Z
published: 2026-10-28T01:54:33Z
canonical: "docs.vastdata.com/kafka-protocol-support-tg"
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.vastdata.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Kafka Protocol Support

The VAST implementation of the Kafka protocol supports a basic subset of the Kafka APIs to allow clients to publish and consume events from the VAST Event Broker.

- VAST Event Broker supports:
  - Producer API
  - Consumer API
  - Consumer groups
  - Database queries on topics
  - Admin API:
    - Create topics
    - Get topic configuration ( ​`describeConfigs`​​ )
    - Update topic configuration (​​`alterConfigs`​​)
    - Delete topics
    - Delete consumer groups
  - Topic compaction
  - SSL

The following Kafka capabilities are not supported:

- Over-the-wire compression of messages. Note that VAST compression of data is supported.
- Automatic creation of topics
- Transactions

The following limitations apply:

- Producer API:
  - Messages are limited to 1MB.
  - In the event record, the key is limited to 126KB and the value is limited to 126KB.
  - Idempotent producing is not supported.
  - Automatic creation of topics is not supported.
- Consumer API:
  - No more than 256 consumer groups per view (broker)
  - The following is not supported:
    - Consumer group stickiness parameters (such as ​group.instance.id​​)
    - READ UNCOMMITTED isolation level
    - Cooperative rebalancing
    - Client rack awareness
    - Fetch sessions (only full fetch will be applied), delayed fetch parameters
    - Seek by time
- Only one virtual IP pool can be associated with a Kafka-enabled view.
- The amount of VAST Event Broker views that you can create on a VAST cluster, is limited by the maximum number of views supported by the cluster and by the maximum number of virtual IP pools (since each broker view requires a dedicated virtual IP pool). See *​VAST Cluster Scale Guidelines*​​ for details.
- The amount of event topics that you can create on a VAST cluster, is limited by the maximum number of tables per VAST Database table (see *​VAST Cluster Scale Guidelines*​​) and the overall amount of event topic partitions.
- A topic can have up to 20,000 partitions. The number of partitions in a topic cannot be changed after the topic has been created. Up to 200,000 partitions are supported per VAST Event Broker view.
- Event queries based on the topic partition are not supported.
- When listing consumer groups, the response is limited to 256 groups per Kafka-enabled view.
- VAST replication of consumer groups is not supported.
- Event publishing and consuming operations, as well as topic management operations are not subject to VAST Protocol Auditing or Quality of Service (QoS).

## Supported Kafka Clients

VAST Cluster supports Confluent Kafka Python client 2.4 - 2.8.