Krabka Documentation

The complete technical guide to building, operating, and streaming with Krabka.

Krabka is a clean-sheet, memory-safe implementation of the Apache Kafka streaming platform. Designed to eliminate the operational overhead, memory pressure, and garbage collection pauses of the JVM, Krabka delivers byte-exact wire-protocol parity across all Kafka APIs while operating in a fraction of the memory.

Key Architectural Pillars

Byte-Exact Wire Parity

Codecs generated directly from upstream Apache Kafka JSON schemas. Compatible with standard kafka-clients, JVM CLI tools, and existing producer/consumer applications.

Native KRaft Quorum

Metadata is replicated via a native Raft implementation (krabka-raft) implementing the KIP-595 RPC protocol with zero ZooKeeper dependency.

Tiered Storage Engine

Asynchronously offload sealed partition segments to Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or MinIO with local NVMe caching.

Polyglot Streams & Arrow

Native stream processing libraries for Go, Java, and Rust featuring zero-copy Apache Arrow batch processing and barrier cuts.

Quick Run

Start local broker:
$ docker run -d -p 9092:9092 krabka/broker:latest