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Please keep the discussion on the mailing list rather than commenting on the wiki (wiki discussions get unwieldy fast).

Motivation

Apache Kafka is rapidly finding its place in data heavy organizations as a fault-tolerant message bus. One of the goals of Kafka is data integration, which makes it important to support many users in one KafkaKafka system. With increasing adoption and user community, support for multi-tenancy is becoming a popular demand. There have been a few discussions on Apache Kafka’s mailing lists regarding the same, indicating importance of the feature. Namespaces  Namespaces will allow/ enable many functionalities that require logical grouping of topics. If you think topic as a SQL table, then namespace is a SQL database that lets you group tables together. Following are a are a few use cases.

• Namespaces will allow users to create topics with same name as long as they are part of different namespaces.
• Allow bootstrapping any new entity in a namespace with some default configs, which is set for that particular namespace, and then letting each entity override parts of that config.
• Similar to configs, acls can be set at namespace level, which is by default inherited by underlying entities.
• When Kafka decides to support at rest encryption, having namespaces at logs level will allow encrypting different namespaces with different keys.

Public Interfaces

Briefly list any new interfaces that will be introduced as part of this proposal or any existing interfaces that will be removed or changed. The purpose of this section is to concisely call out the public contract that will come along with this feature.

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• What impact (if any) will there be on existing users?
• If we are changing behavior how will we phase out the older behavior?
• If we need special migration tools, describe them here.
• When will we remove the existing behavior?

Rejected Alternatives

Following are a few alternatives that we considered.

1. Just prepend namespace to topic names
2. Manage namespaces separately
3. Change the world