...
The proposed change is to create a new ACL operation called AUTO_CREATE that will be checked to see if a user is authorized to auto create topics instead of using the existing CREATE operation. This new operation will apply both cluster wide (allowed to create a topic of any name) or topic wide (will validate by topic name or prefix). The CREATE operation will still be used for the existing CreateTopicsRequest command. Going forward this will allow an administrator to grant permission to auto create topics with cluster defaults but not to explicitly create topics.
The goals of this change:
1) Allow admins or super users the ability to create topics and also set explicit configs on the new topics.
2) Allow some users the ability to auto-create topics but not set explicit configs (only given cluster defaults).
3) Deny creation of topics entirely to other users.
Compatibility, Deprecation, and Migration Plan
...