Default replication factor for internal offsets topic prevents users from reading from clusters that have less than three nodes.

[soenkeliebau]

When deploying Kafka clusters with less than three nodes the default value of 3 for offsets.topic.replication.factor prohibits users from reading any values from topics.

Writing works fine, if topics are created with few enough partitions - or auto-created which observes available broker count for the replication factor.
But when reading for the first time, Kafka internally tries to create the __consumer_offsets topic, and this is required to have three partitions by default. And until this has been created no read requests are allowed.

The broker simply keeps logging

kafka [2023-05-05 15:20:39,078] INFO [Admin Manager on Broker 1001]: Error processing create topic request CreatableTopic(name='__consumer_offsets', numPartitions=50, replicationFactor=3, assignments=[], configs=[CreateableTopicConfig(name='compression.type', value='producer'), CreateableTopicConfig(name='cleanup.policy', value='compact'), CreateableTopicConfig(name='segment.bytes'
kafka org.apache.kafka.common.errors.InvalidReplicationFactorException: Replication factor: 3 larger than available brokers: 1.

Possible solutions are:

• documentation - this is not strictly speaking a bug, but also not nice
• catch it during validation in the operator and log an error
• automatically set this in the config when deploying less than 3 brokers
• ...

[lfrancke]

Good catch.

Technical question: Let's say a customer starts with 1 node, we set the setting to 1 as well. Customer later scales up to 5 nodes, we set it to 3. What will happen with existing topics? They will keep the original 1 setting, correct?

[soenkeliebau]

This should change the replication factor to three at that point.
I'd have to test it to be 100% sure, but am pretty sure that this setting is actively monitored by Kafka, since it only applies to one topic specifically.

Just to make sure I don't create confusion, this setting only applies to the __consumer_offsets topic, this is not the default replication factor setting that applies to all new topics that are created without specifying a replication factor.

[lfrancke]

This at least needs some documentation but I'd prefer an automatic setting change I believe

[razvan]

We have come full-circle. Today I was bitten by this and found it by googling the problem :)
I believe documentation would probably only have helped if the actual error message was included.