Managed Service for Apache Kafka limitations

Managed Service for Apache Kafka requires each cluster to have equal resources in each of the three zones. Single-zone or two-zone Managed Service for Apache Kafka clusters are not supported.

You cannot choose the zones when you create the cluster.

You cannot configure the volume of local storage on a cluster.

Managed Service for Apache Kafka runs in the KRaft mode. Zookeeper mode is not supported.

JMX APIs for metrics are not supported.

Topic compression with zstd is not supported. Supported values for compression.type include lz4, gzip, snappy, and uncompressed.

While you can change broker configurations with read-only update mode at any time, these changes take effect only when the brokers restart. Restarts happen periodically as part of Google's maintenance and upgrade processes, but there's no set schedule or a way to manually trigger them. As a result, you can't control when these changes take effect. Examples of read-only configurations include auto.create.topics.enable and background.threads. Updates to configurations with the cluster-wide update mode, such as message.max.bytes, don't require restarts and take effect immediately.

Some broker configuration parameters are managed by the service and cannot be updated. This includes broker.id and storage-related settings, such as remote.log.storage.system.enable.