Julian Wiley

Kafka topic naming notes

Quick reference for kafka topic naming notes.

Context

Project: RPi Kubernetes

Repository: rpi_kubernetes

This note is a compact reference for a hybrid k3s homelab with an Ubuntu control plane, four Raspberry Pi 5 workers, Cloudflare Tunnel, and a data platform made from Kafka, Flink, Redis Stack, MinIO, DataHub, Airbyte, Polaris, and observability services.

Checklist

  • Use domain prefixes
  • Separate raw, curated, and command topics
  • Document retention and schema ownership
  • Avoid temporary topic names in manifests

Commands and inspection

# Start with the project README, then narrow to the subsystem docs.
rg "Kafka" .

# For Kubernetes-backed components, inspect the namespace before changing it.
kubectl get pods --all-namespaces

Usage note

Keep this note close to the implementation. If the command, manifest, or API changes, update the reference before writing a narrative post about the change.