Installation Prerequisites

To prepare your environment to install Cloudflow, you will need:

  • Helm version 3 or higher (check with helm version)

  • Kubectl

  • Kafka

Helm

Follow the documentation to install Helm version 3 or higher.

kubectl

Before proceeding, make sure that kubectl for your Kubernetes distribution is correctly installed and access the Kubernetes cluster to install Cloudflow. Cloudflow supports a variety of distributions, see versions.

Check the version with the following command:

kubectl version

Kafka

Kafka is used by Cloudflow to connect streamlets together in a blueprint. If you intend to connect streamlets in this way, at least one Kafka cluster should be available before installation. Cloudflow may be used without Kafka (for example, when your application contains a single streamlet, or an Akka cluster), but if your team intends to connect streamlets together and not include Kafka connection information in each topic they define then it’s recommended to define a default Kafka cluster at install time.

The Kafka broker bootstrap configuration string is a comma-separated list of host/port pairs used by Cloudflow to establish the connection to a Kafka cluster. The configuration string should have the following format:

broker-1-address:broker-1-port, broker-2-address;broker-2-port

If you want to test Cloudflow and need a Kafka cluster, we recommend using Strimzi during development, a third-party Kafka operator that can create and manage Kafka clusters.

See Installing Kafka with Strimzi as a guide on how to configure and install a Kafka cluster using Strimzi.

Please make sure to choose a suitable Kafka service that matches your experience with running Kafka in production.

The default build tool for Cloudflow applications is sbt but there is support for using Maven to build as well. If you are going to use Maven, make sure to have it installed as well.