ngrok DNS headaches

Let’s not bury the lede: it was DNS. However, unlike the meme ("It’s not DNS, it’s never DNS. It was DNS"), I didn’t even have an inkling that DNS might be the problem.

I’m writing a new blog about streaming Apache Kafka data to Apache Iceberg and wanted to provision a local Kafka cluster to pull data from remotely. I got this working nicely just last year using ngrok to expose the broker to the interwebz, so figured I’d use this again. Simple, right?

Nope.

Nov 1, 2023

Using Apache Kafka with ngrok

Sometimes you might want to access Apache Kafka that’s running on your local machine from another device not on the same network. I’m not sure I can think of a production use-case, but there are a dozen examples for sandbox, demo, and playground environments.

In this post we’ll see how you can use ngrok to, in their words, Put localhost on the internet. And specifically, your local Kafka broker on the internet.