To evaluate the services Banzai Cloud Supertubes offers, we recommend to create a test environment and use our demo cluster. This way you can start over any time, and try all the options you are interested in without having to worry about changes made to your existing environment, even if it’s not used in production.

Production installation is very similar, but of course you won’t need to deploy the demo cluster, and you must exactly specify which components you want to use.

Prerequisites 🔗︎

Before deploying Supertubes on your cluster, complete the following tasks.

Create a test cluster 🔗︎

You need a Kubernetes cluster to test Supertubes with. If you don’t already have a Kubernetes cluster to work with, create one with one of the following methods:


Make sure that your Kubernetes cluster has sufficient resources.

  • The requirements can be as high as 12 CPUs and 20 GiB of RAM if you try all the features with our demo cluster, and heavily depend on the workload.
  • The minimum requirements are 9 CPUs and 10 GiB of RAM on a local machine. If you are testing on a cluster at a cloud provider, use nodes that have at least 4 CPUs (for example, c5.xlarge on AWS).
  • You can use the self-hosted or the free online version of Banzai Cloud Pipeline to deploy a cluster.
  • Deploy a single-node Banzai Cloud PKE cluster on a physical or virtual Linux box.
  • Launch a cluster at one of the many cloud providers’ managed offerings at their console.
  • Use KinD on your machine (make sure to increase the resource allocation of Docker for Mac).

    Note: KinD does not support LoadBalancers, therefore you won’t be able to test external listeners.

Install the Supertubes tool 🔗︎

Install the Supertubes command-line tool. You can use the Supertubes CLI tool to install Supertubes and other components to your cluster.

Note: The Supertubes CLI supports macOS and Linux (x86_64). It may work on Windows natively, but we don’t test it.

  1. Register for an evaluation version of Supertubes.

    As you might know, Cisco has recently acquired Banzai Cloud. Currently we are in a transitional period and are moving our infrastructure. As part of the process, we are temporarily suspending access to evaluation downloads until we verify that they comply with Cisco’s policies. We hope to resume access to evaluation licenses in April. Until then, contact us so we can discuss your needs and requirements, and organize a live demo.

  2. Install the supertubes-cli package for your environment by running the following command:

    Evaluation downloads are temporarily suspended. Contact us to discuss your needs and requirements, and organize a live demo.

    For other options, see the Supertubes CLI Installation Guide.

Set Kubernetes configuration and context 🔗︎

The command-line tool uses your current Kubernetes context, from the file named in the KUBECONFIG environment variable (~/.kube/config by default). Check if this is the cluster you plan to deploy the product by running the following command: kubectl config get-contexts

If there are multiple contexts in the Kubeconfig file, specify the one you want to use with the use-context parameter, for example: kubectl config use-context <context-to-use>

If the cluster is managed by Banzai Cloud Pipeline, complete the following steps. For more detailed instructions, see the Banzai Cloud Pipeline documentation.

  1. Login to your Pipeline instance (for example, by running banzai login --endpoint /pipeline).
  2. Run banzai cluster shell, and select the cluster to use. A subshell with the correct environment will open automatically.

Deploy Supertubes 🔗︎

After you have completed the Prerequisites, you can install Supertubes on a single cluster.

  1. Run the following command. It will install the Kafka operator and all dependencies (for example, Prometheus).

    supertubes install -a

    If the above command fails, for example, with a timeout, simply re-run the command.

    Note: the supertubes install -a command assumes that there is a default storage class available on the cluster, to provision the needed volumes. If your Kubernetes environment doesn’t have a default storage class, then the CRs deployed by Supertubes must be adjusted in order to work in your environment. In that case, request a demo and describe your use case so we can guide you through the configuration details as part of the demo.

  2. Verify that the Kafka cluster is running:

    supertubes cluster get -n kafka --kafka-cluster kafka -c <path-to-k8s-cluster-kubeconfig-file>

    Expected output:

    Namespace  Name   State           Image                               Alerts  Cruise Control Topic Status  Rolling Upgrade Errors  Rolling Upgrade Last Success  
    kafka      kafka  ClusterRunning  banzaicloud/kafka:2.13-2.6.0-bzc.1  0       CruiseControlTopicReady      0 
  3. Create a topic with one partition and a replication factor of one.

    supertubes cluster topic create -n kafka --kafka-cluster kafka -c <path-to-k8s-cluster-kubeconfig-file>  -f- <<EOF
    kind: KafkaTopic
      name: test-topic
      name: test-topic
      partitions: 3
      replicationFactor: 2
        "": "28800000"
        "cleanup.policy": "delete"
  4. Write messages to the new topic.

    kubectl apply -n kafka -f- <<EOF
    apiVersion: v1
    kind: Pod
      name: kafkacat
      - name: kafka-test
        image: "solsson/kafkacat:alpine"
        # Just spin & wait forever
        args: [ "while true; do sleep 3000; done;" ]
    kubectl exec -n kafka -it kafkacat bash
    kafkacat -b kafka-all-broker:29092 -P -t test-topic
  5. Verify that you can read back the messages, and which broker is the partition leader for test-topic.

    kafkacat -b kafka-all-broker:29092 -C -t test-topic -c2

    Expected output:

    kafkacat -b kafka-all-broker:29092 -L -t test-topic
    Metadata for test-topic (from broker -1: kafka-all-broker:29092/bootstrap):
    3 brokers:
    broker 0 at kafka-0.kafka.svc.cluster.local:29092 (controller)
    broker 2 at kafka-2.kafka.svc.cluster.local:29092
    broker 1 at kafka-1.kafka.svc.cluster.local:29092
    1 topics:
    topic "test-topic" with 1 partitions:
        partition 0, leader 2, replicas: 2, isrs: 2
  6. Open the Supertubes Dashboard web interface to check the status of your Kafka cluster.

    supertubes dashboard

    The Supertubes web interface opens in your browser.