Kafka Topic Properties Reference

This reference lists the Kafka properties you can set on a topic, the properties a topic inherits, and the properties that cannot be changed.

Goal

Know which Kafka properties you can set on a topic and what each one does.

Audience

Topic Owner, a user who can configure a topic’s advanced Kafka properties.

When to use

Use this reference when choosing properties to set on a topic or when reviewing inherited defaults.

Contents

The sections below cover each area in this reference:

Instance Properties

Instance properties provide default properties to any topic config that belongs to the instance. Topic configs inherit them, as listed in Inherited Kafka Properties.

The create-stream.disable-time property defines how long a user must wait before recreating a deleted topic. The value is expressed in minutes and matters when deploying a topic to an instance with distribution.

Topic Properties

Topic properties allow fine-grained per-topic Kafka configuration.

Supported Kafka Properties

The following Kafka properties can be set on a topic:

  • compression.type

  • delete.retention.ms

  • max.compaction.lag.ms

  • message.timestamp.after.max.ms

  • message.timestamp.before.max.ms

  • message.timestamp.type

  • min.cleanable.dirty.ratio

  • min.compaction.lag.ms

  • retention.bytes

  • segment.ms

This list is updated every release.

Inherited Kafka Properties

The following properties are defined on another resource, and the topic config inherits them:

  • cleanup.policy

  • min.insync.replicas

  • replication.factor

replication.factor is the number of brokers a message is replicated to. It is based on Kafka’s default.replication.factor and depends on the number of brokers available for the tenant. min.insync.replicas works the same way.

cleanup.policy defines whether the topic is compact, delete, or both. It is defined on the Topic, and every Topic Config inherits it.

Unsupported Kafka Properties

The following properties cannot be changed. The broker default is used for platform consistency:

  • file.delete.delay.ms

  • flush.messages

  • flush.ms

  • follower.replication.throttled.replicas

  • index.interval.bytes

  • leader.replication.throttled.replicas

  • message.downconversion.enable

  • preallocate

  • segment.index.bytes

  • segment.jitter.ms

  • unclean.leader.election.enable