Investigate aiokafka

[gabriel-tincu]

https://github.com/aio-libs/aiokafka is a bit behind the curve but may still provide enough to justify adoption.

POC for the Schema Registry API: https://github.com/aiven/karapace/compare/gabi-aiokafka

[gabriel-tincu]

As it stands ATM, there were some issues with the client constructor / bootstrapping in real environments (call to bootstrap would block indefinitely) This issue will remain open however as aiokafka is a much better fit for Karapace due to its async nature

[hackaugusto]

Perhaps the best approach here is to use confluent-kafka-python. The library is licensed with Apache-2.0, seems to be better maintained, and it is a wrapper around the C implementation which should be a bit faster. The other OSS implementations are really lagging behind in merging bugfixes and new features.

[jjaakola-aiven]

Aiokafka is used in Karapace.