When it comes to a need to setup a local Apache Kafka instance for some experiments or tests it may turn into an exercise that is not easy to complete.
Problems that may arise are usually quite different, it can be connectivity between Kafka and Zookeeper (prior to KIP-500), exposing a listener for incoming connections, or plugging in any friendly UI for handy observability/management of the Kafka instance.
To simplify these preparational steps Docker Compose can be used. It allows to start all the components, wire them up in a single network and expose necessary ports to the host machine. But it also requires a bit of knowledge about Kafka internals and configuration properties. So making it from scratch may require some effort.
And here is a small guide on how this can be done faster.
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