Step 1: Creating topics

Creating topics

In this step, you will create and configure a topic. Producer and consumer applications will later connect to it.

Let’s begin by logging into the Self-Service portal. In case you requested a Trial, your credentials were supplied in an e-mail.

Once logged in, you will see the following screen:

Dashboard
Click the circle button with a right arrow icon in the top-left of the screen to display text-labels next to the menu-buttons.

Creating a topic

  1. Click Topics

topic overview

  1. In the top-right corner of the screen, click the New topic button.

  2. Use applicationlogevents as the topic Name

New topic view

  1. Description: Enter a description which helps (future) colleagues understand what kind of data is available on the topic. I.e. "Logs created by various applications at 'Demo Tenant'.".

  2. Owner: Select Admins as the owner. Resource-access is group-based, and you currently belong to this group.

  3. Key Type & Value Type: Select AVRO from the drop-down, for both. This will open two more drop-downs, prompting you to select which schemas to use for the key and the value.

    1. Key Schema: Select io.axual.client.example.schema.Application

    2. Value Schema: Select io.axual.client.example.schema.ApplicationLogEvent

  4. Retention Policy: Select Delete to remove messages from the Kafka topic after the retention time has passed

If you’re not using an Axual Trial environment, these schemas may not be available to you. Use other schemas that are already available, or follow the Schema Management guide to upload new schemas.

You can leave the rest of the fields as they are.

  1. Click Add Topic, at the bottom-right of the screen

The topic-definition was created:

topic applicationlogevents

The topic is not yet "deployed". We’ll deploy the topic onto an environment.

Deploying the topic

Axual introduced the notion of "environments": a topic can be deployed onto one or multiple environments. This enables developers to use testing environments while setting their applications up, and later "promote" their topic to production environments.

Environments offer strict data and permission separation between topic-deployments. An application connected to the "development" deployment of a topic doesn’t have access to the "production" deployment of the same topic. For all intents and purposes, you can see different topic-deployments as completely separate topics.

  1. Click the environment drop-down and select the example environment. This is the only preconfigured environment in the Axual-Trial.

  2. On the topic card, there is a gear icon and a blue circle indicating that configuration is not setup for this environment. Click the gear icon.

Config topic button

  1. Enter a retention time (e.g. 1 day)

  2. Select a version (e.g 1-io.axual.client.example.ApplicationLogEvent) as the Key and Value Schema version from the dropdown (or any that is available)

  3. Enter a number of partitions (e.g. 2)

  4. Click "Save" to deploy your topic. The topic has now become active in the example environment.

Config topic view

Optional

Create and deploy another topic, in the same example environment. Name it example-string-topic and use String as both the Key and Value type.

Next step: Creating applications

In step 2, we’ll create application registrations in the self-service portal.

Proceed to Step 2: Creating applications