A self-service, developer-friendly REST API layer for Apache Kafka to simplify queue management, message handling, and extended features like DLQ and retry queues.
This open-source tool enables product teams, platform teams, and microservices to create and manage Kafka queues without needing to understand Kafka internals.
POST /queues– Create a topic with configGET /queues/:name– Fetch topic metadataDELETE /queues/:name– Delete topicPATCH /queues/:name/config– Update topic config (retention, partitions, etc.)GET /queues– List all topics (with optional filters like tenant, tags, etc.)
POST /queues/:name/messages– Produce message to a topicGET /queues/:name/messages– Read messages (seek by offset/timestamp)POST /queues/:name/seek– Rewind consumer to offset or timestamp
- Dead Letter Queue (DLQ)
- Auto-create
<topic>-dlqwith separate retention - Route failed messages on retry exhaustion
- Auto-create
- Retry Queues
- Configure retry strategies (linear, exponential, fixed interval)
- Message Expiry
- Optional TTL per message
- Schema Validation
- Optional Avro/JSON schema enforcement
- Multi-tenant support with namespace isolation
- JWT/API Key-based auth with RBAC
- Access control for operations (create, produce, consume)
- Audit logs of queue events
- Quota enforcement (throughput, topic limit, etc.)
- Topic lag monitoring per consumer group
- API for queue health status
- View last N messages via REST or UI
- Export Prometheus metrics
- Alert integrations (Slack, email, etc.)
- OpenAPI spec for REST
- SDKs in Node.js, Python, Go
- CLI tool:
kqctl - Web dashboard to manage and inspect queues
- Dry-run support for queue config validation
- GitOps-style declarative queue management (via config sync)
- Webhook triggers on DLQ / retries / threshold breaches
- Schema Registry support (Confluent/Apicurio)
- Pluggable DLQ backends (Kafka, S3, PostgreSQL)
- Multi-cluster Kafka routing
- SLA Policies on queues (e.g., delivery deadlines)
- Topic versioning
- Message reprocessing UI with filters
- Backend: Node.js (Express/Fastify) / Go / Python (FastAPI)
- Kafka Client: kafkajs / spring-kafka / confluent-kafka-python
- DB (for metadata): PostgreSQL / SQLite (for dev)
- Auth: JWT / OAuth2 / API keys
- Monitoring: Prometheus + Grafana
- UI (Optional): React + Tailwind
- Internal tooling for platform/infra teams
- CI/CD pipelines that need ephemeral queues
- Microservice-driven apps with custom retry/DLQ logic
- External apps needing simplified Kafka interaction
Open Source – Apache 2.0