Asp.Net core sample connecting to message hub from Bluemix

[ibm-messaging]

Asp.Net core sample connecting to message hub from Bluemix

[edoardocomar]

Hi @goupadhy we have not tried any asp.net kafka library.
The requirement to connect to IBM MessageHub Kafka in Bluemix is to support the SASL PLAIN authentication mechanism over an SSL connection.
Of the two libraries you mention, the first is described by the author as a personal pet project.
The second one is based on librdkafka which supports the options we need except on Windows, where SASL is not implemented
Please see the options set in the node.js console sample that get passed to librdkafka.

AFAIK at the moment, on Windows the best option is to use the Java client.

[goupadhy]

Thanks for your response. We are trying to use asp.net core instead of node/java. We are trying to connect from Asp.Net Core application running on Bluemix not windows machine. Is there a way we can talk to message hub from asp.net core that you are aware of?

[edoardocomar]

Hi @goupadhy we have not looked at asp.net clients.

As https://github.com/ah-/rdkafka-dotnet is based on librdkafka that seems a candidate.
Please note
1 - the librdkafka options required to connect , see the kafka-nodejs-console-sample example, are :

    var driver_options = {
        //'debug': 'all',
        'metadata.broker.list': opts.brokers,
        'security.protocol': 'sasl_ssl',
        'ssl.ca.location': opts.calocation,
        'sasl.mechanisms': 'PLAIN',
        'sasl.username': opts.username,
        'sasl.password': opts.password
    };

2 - At least on the Bluemix buildpack for node.js, librdkafka does not build with SASL enabled because of a missing development library.
Our workaround, again illustrated by the kafka-nodejs-console-sample example was to deploy a prebuilt binary.

[mimaison]

We're not planning on adding a .Net sample at the moment.

This .Net client should work with Event Streams: https://github.com/confluentinc/confluent-kafka-dotnet as it's based on librdkafka which we know works well