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While deleting records from a topic is not the same as deleting the topic itself, both result in records being deleted, and it is those records which have value to the company or organisation operating the cluster. Thus if topic deletion is deserving of a policy, it should also be possible to apply a similar policy to record deletion, otherwise a user might be able to apply business rules to on the one kind of deletion, but not the other. If there were a separate TopicDeletePolicy and MessageDeletePolicy we have the similar problem as described above for separate topic creation and modification policies: It's unnecessarily difficult and tedious to keep the policies consistent and correctly configured.

Problem 5 - The existing CreateTopicPolicy doesn't have enough information

As noted in KIP-170, for some use cases, the existing CreateTopicPolicy doesn't get passed enough information for the operators desired rules to be enfored. For example, while providing Kafka-as-a-Service there is the need to ensure that the new topic require more resources than the cluster can support (e.g. number of partitions won't exceed some maximum).

Public Interfaces

A new policy interface will be added, TopicManagementPolicy will apply to topic creation, topic alteration, topic deletion and message deletion. It will be configured by the new topic.management.policy.class.name config.

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