Kaskade

Kaskade is a text user interface for Apache Kafka that runs in the terminal, allowing developers to interact with Kafka clusters entirely from the keyboard. It provides two main commands: one for managing topics and consumer groups, and another for reading records. Users can browse cluster information including topics, partitions, consumer groups, and lag, as well as create, edit, and delete topics. The tool supports reading records in multiple formats including JSON, Avro, and Protobuf, with optional integration to Schema Registry services for decoding.

Kaskade handles various connection scenarios including standard brokers, TLS, SASL, Confluent Cloud, and Amazon MSK IAM authentication through configuration files. The tool can display records that fail to decode, showing both the raw bytes and error messages while continuing consumption. It is developed by sauljabin and released under the MIT license. Written in Python, Kaskade can be installed via Homebrew or pipx.