Deleting a kafka topic from the operator without deleting it from the cluster.

[ostecke]

I'm stuck in the following situation, perhaps somebody can provide me with some experience.

I created some Kafka topics on a Kafka cluster which where picked up by the topic operator. Now I want to move 'ownership' of the configuration of those topics to a solution using Gitops, without losing the data inside the topics. Creating the topics in Gitops results in errors in the kafka operator of the following kind:

Topic 'ABC' is already managed via KafkaTopic 'abc---e3641c36628a11df6b6b44fa28209f294e034a19' it cannot also be managed via the KafkaTopic 'abc'

To solve the issue I wanted to try the following:

1. stop the topic operator
2. delete abc---e3641c36628a11df6b6b44fa28209f294e034a19 without deleting the topic on the cluster
3. create KafkaTopic 'abc' using Gitops
4. start the topic operator

Especially step 2 seems to be difficult. Anybody who can help me out here ?

[scholzj]

@tombentley Any ideas?

[klebediev]

Probably Unidirectional Topic Operator will fix this issue. Read the link for details