Hi Alex. A rejected alternative is to try to do SSL handshake from the plaintext transport layer. This couples various transport layers and is inflexible to adding new transport layers in the future. Further, if the plaintext transport layer does SSL handshake, it will always get an error, irrespective of whether or not the peer supports SSL. Therefore, the plaintext transport layer would have to determine if the peer uses SSL or not based on the type of error it gets back from the SSL handshake. This fits right into the general anti-pattern of using exceptions as control flow mechanisms.
Another rejected alternative would be to have a single byte at the transport layer represent the security protocol in use. This byte would have to be present in every single message between clients and brokers and between brokers and brokers. This change is backwards-incompatible and adds overhead to Kafka. It is likely never going to get accepted by the community. In the absence of a fool-proof way to do a handhskake across all security protocols (plaintext, SSL, other future ones), I think that the proposed KIP provides a good solution. Therefore, you have my +1. (Not sure if my +1 counts, since I am a Kafka noob). Thanks. Gokul Ramanan Subramanian Senior SDE, Amazon AWS On 28/Jul/19 05:43:19PM +0100, Alexandre Dupriez wrote: Hello, I have created the KIP-498 <https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-498%3A+Add+client-side+configuration+for+maximum+response+size+to+protect+against+OOM> to propose a minor addition to the producer configuration properties, in order to protect against OOM when the response message decoded by a client indicates an "abnormally high" size to be allocated. This follows this discussion thread <https://www.mail-archive.com/dev@kafka.apache.org/msg55658.html> and is tracked by KAFKA-4090 <https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-4090>. Please let me know what you think. I created this KIP even though the change seems minimal because it affects client configuration, which is mentioned as a type of change eligible for a KIP on this main wiki page <https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/Kafka+Improvement+Proposals> . Thanks, Alexandre
