Upgrading to 11.4.x fails due to inter.broker.protocol.version

Symptoms

When upgrading to 11.4.x from an earlier version of Event Streams that is deployed on IBM Cloud Pak for Integration and you did not explicitly set the inter.broker.protocol.version in the spec.strimziOverrides.kafka.config section of your EventStreams custom resource, the upgrade fails with the following errors and warnings:

  • EventStreams custom resource shows status as Failed with the following error:

    FatalProblem-Error while waiting for restarted pod <kafka-pod-name> to become ready.

  • Kafka pods go into a CrashLoopBackOff state, and the following error is displayed in the logs:

    CrashLoopBackOff indicates that the application within the container is failing to start properly.

  • A warning similar to the following is displayed in the Kafka pod logs:

    Node <node-number> disconnected. 
Cancelled in-flight FETCH request with correlation id <id> due to node <node-number> being disconnected Client requested connection close from node <node-number>
Error sending fetch request (sessionId=INVALID, epoch=INITIAL) to node <node-number>: 
java.io.IOException: Connection to 2 was disconnected before the response was read
...
Error in response for fetch request...
java.io.IOException: Connection to 2 was disconnected before the response was read
...

Causes

Some Kafka brokers are using the newer protocol version while other Kafka brokers are still on the earlier versions.

Resolving the problem

  1. In the spec.strimziOverrides.kafka.config section of your EventStreams custom resource, add the inter.broker.protocol.version value to match the Kafka version that you are using. For example, if you are currently using the Kafka version 3.6.1, set the value to 3.6.
  2. Wait for the Kafka pods to roll and the EventStreams instance to become ready.
  3. Continue to upgrade your Event Streams to 11.4.x.
  4. Change the inter.broker.protocol.version value in the EventStreams custom resource to the Kafka version that is supported in your Event Streams version as described in the post-upgrade tasks.