Topic Operator Shows Removed Topics

[kannan4183]

Hi all,

We deleted a large number of topics from the Strimzi Kafka cluster due to an issue that triggered bulk topic creation. Although the topics were successfully removed directly from the cluster using the "kafka-admin" client, the Entity Operator running in the namespace is still listing them.

Any help to to triage the issue ??

Strimzi Operator version : 0.39.0
Kafka version : kafka-3.5.2

[ppatierno]

The 0.39.0 version already had the unidirectional topic operator (TO) feature gate enabled by default. It means that if you are using the TO to create topics so by creating KafkaTopic custom resources, you have to delete those custom resources to delete topics and not doing that via the kafka-admin client, otherwise they are just re-created by the TO because the KafkaTopic resources are still there.

[kannan4183]

hi @ppatierno thanks you for your response

We’ve enabled a feature gate to prevent further use of Unidirectional TO. Additionally, we deleted the bulk topics from two other clusters that have identical configurations. Interestingly, when the topics were deleted in those clusters, the TO also reflected the same behavior.

STRIMZI_FEATURE_GATES: -UnidirectionalTopicOperator,-KafkaNodePools

[ppatierno]

I think you should avoid doing both things I see there.
BTO (bidirectional) is not supported anymore and now UTO is the default.
Also new Strimzi is now strongly based on KafkaNodePool also for KRaft reasons.

[kannan4183]

With this release, we intend to enable Nodepool support and eliminate the Topic Operator from the Strimzi deployment, since topic provisioning is already handled via dedicated CI/CD pipelines.

[kannan4183]

Another observation from the TO logs is that the topics deleted from the clusters are not being periodically reconciled either.