// the find
vdesabou/kafka-docker-playground
🐳✨ Fully automated Apache Kafka® and Confluent Docker based examples // 👷♂️ Easily build examples or reproduction models
A massive collection of shell scripts and Docker Compose files that spin up Kafka and Confluent Platform in every configuration imaginable — 170+ on-prem connectors, 100+ managed connectors, SASL/RBAC/SSL setups, Confluent Cloud examples. It's primarily a testing and reproduction-model toolkit, not something you'd run in production. The target audience is Confluent engineers and platform teams who need to quickly spin up a broken config to file a support ticket.
The connector coverage is genuinely impressive — if you're debugging a Debezium SQL Server source or an S3 sink with IAM role assumption, there's almost certainly an example here that matches your exact scenario. The CI pipeline runs these examples automatically, so they're not just bit-rotted scripts. Version pinning works: you can test connector behavior across specific CP versions without maintaining your own matrix. The CLI tooling (`playground` command) wraps the chaos into something navigable.
It's a single-maintainer project with 782 stars and 244 forks — that ratio suggests most people clone it and never contribute back, so bus-factor is real. The repo is enormous (thousands of files) and discovery is poor without the documentation site; finding the right example requires either knowing the directory naming convention or using the external site. The Shell scripting style is inconsistent across examples, and there's no abstraction — similar setup patterns are copy-pasted rather than factored out. This is explicitly not for production use, so if you're hoping to extract patterns for your own infra, you'll be reading shell scripts that hard-code localhost ports and assume a specific Docker network topology.