How to produce tombstone messages in apache kafka?

Question

I want to delete messages from topics using messages coming to the Confluent REST Proxy. I found information about tombstones, but I didn't find any use cases. Is there any way I can transmit a tombstone message over the http protocol? Perhaps there are other ways to delete messages?

I found several commands for Kafka Command Line, but they cannot be called from the outside.

Answer 1

Kafka records cannot be deleted by any producer client

Tombstones are new events, and are used for compacted topics only. Otherwise, it's just a record with a non null key and a null value, which should be possible to just put null as the JSON payload for the record value...

It's up to the broker, not the REST Proxy Log cleaner to delete/compact any closed segments on disk

command line... cannot be called from the outside.

Unclear what this means, but yes they can, unless you have some firewall policies that are specific to your network