Apache Kafka on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

Apache Kafka 4.0 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS — event streaming for Azure Marketplace

Apache Kafka is the open-source distributed event streaming platform trusted by thousands of organisations to handle trillions of events per day. Version 4.0 runs in KRaft mode — the ZooKeeper-free consensus architecture that eliminates an entire infrastructure tier and lets your team deploy a fully self-managed broker in under 10 minutes. This image ships Kafka 4.0 pre-installed, pre-configured, and hardened on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, ready to accept producers and consumers on first boot inside your Azure subscription.

Why this image: Standing up Kafka on Azure without a managed service means more than a package install — you also configure KRaft quorum IDs, tune kernel network buffers, wire a systemd service with correct restart semantics, and patch current Ubuntu CVEs. This image does all of that so your team ships a working event streaming broker without the manual configuration pain.

Who this is for: Platform engineers who need a self-managed Kafka broker in their own Azure subscription without a managed-service premium. Data engineers building real-time ETL and CDC pipelines. Application teams adding event-driven architecture to microservices.

Target use cases:

• Real-time event streaming — ingest millions of events per second at sub-millisecond latency with Kafka's append-only log architecture
• Change data capture (CDC) — stream database change events from PostgreSQL and MySQL to downstream consumers without polling
• Microservice decoupling — replace synchronous API calls with durable event topics so services fail independently and replay on recovery
• Log aggregation — fan in application logs from hundreds of hosts to a single durable topic, then fan out to Azure Data Lake or Elasticsearch

What is pre-installed and configured:

• Apache Kafka 4.0 in KRaft mode — no ZooKeeper dependency; pinned release to avoid surprise upgrades
• KRaft quorum pre-configured — single-node combined controller and broker; scale to multi-node by editing server.properties
• systemd unit pre-configured — starts on boot, restarts on failure, logs to the journal
• Kernel network buffers tuned — TCP buffer sizes set to Kafka's recommended values to prevent packet drops at high throughput
• 33 hardening steps applied — automated audit covering Trusted Launch, SSH key injection, walinuxagent, Defender for Cloud, and cloud-init idempotency
• Trusted Launch with Secure Boot enabled — Gen2 image with vTPM and signed boot per Microsoft requirements
• Azure Linux Agent pre-installed — custom-script extension, run-command, and managed identity work on first boot
• Monthly patch cadence — rebuilt from upstream Ubuntu and Apache security advisories within days of each release

Recommended deployment: Standard_D4as_v5 (4 vCPU, 16 GB RAM) for development and single-partition workloads under 50 MB/s. Standard_D8as_v5 (8 vCPU, 32 GB RAM) for production brokers. Attach a Premium SSD data disk for the Kafka log directory.

System requirements: Minimum 2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM. Gen2 VM with Secure Boot and vTPM required. Open TCP 9092 (plaintext) or 9093 (TLS) inbound in your Network Security Group.

Azure integration: Azure Monitor Agent, Defender for Cloud, Azure Backup, and Update Manager extensions install without conflicts. Assign a Managed Identity to let your producers and consumers retrieve bootstrap credentials from Azure Key Vault without embedding secrets in configuration files.

Licensing: Apache Kafka is Apache License 2.0 open-source software. No per-seat license or royalty required. Only standard Azure compute and storage rates apply.

Support: Email support@dcassociatesgroup.com for deployment assistance. Community support is available via the Apache Kafka mailing lists and GitHub project.