I'm new to Kubernetes, and fairly new to Kafka.

My goal is to get my Kafka Connect instance to properly connect to my Broker, so that it can receive messages.

So far, I've created a Zookeeper deployment and wrapped it in a service. (As far as I understand, this is necessary for the Kafka broker to be able to refer to zookeeper as simply "zookeeper:2181".)

I had hoped that setting up the Kafka Connect instance would be just as simple. I wrapped my broker in a service, and pointed my Connect instance to it by name.

worker.properties

bootstrap.servers=kafka-broker:9092

However, Connect crashes with this exception:

java.io.IOException: Can't resolve address: kafka-broker-57b74c6766-d9w5j:9092
    at org.apache.kafka.common.network.Selector.doConnect(Selector.java:235)
    at org.apache.kafka.common.network.Selector.connect(Selector.java:214)
    at org.apache.kafka.clients.NetworkClient.initiateConnect(NetworkClient.java:864)
    at org.apache.kafka.clients.NetworkClient.ready(NetworkClient.java:265)
    at org.apache.kafka.clients.admin.KafkaAdminClient$AdminClientRunnable.sendEligibleCalls(KafkaAdminClient.java:889)
    at org.apache.kafka.clients.admin.KafkaAdminClient$AdminClientRunnable.run(KafkaAdminClient.java:1104)
    at java.base/java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:834)
Caused by: java.nio.channels.UnresolvedAddressException
    at java.base/sun.nio.ch.Net.checkAddress(Net.java:130)
    at java.base/sun.nio.ch.SocketChannelImpl.connect(SocketChannelImpl.java:675)
    at org.apache.kafka.common.network.Selector.doConnect(Selector.java:233)
    ... 6 more

I've created an alpine-based pod as described here, and I can successfully curl -v kafka-broker:9092. But this is not the address that Connect is trying to resolve. It's trying to resolve kafka-broker-57b74c6766-d9w5j:9092, which, like Connect, I cannot resolve. I'm not sure why Connect is trying to contact a specific pod, since this is the exact problem that Kubernetes services are supposed to prevent (in my limited understanding, anyway).

How can get Connect to communicate to the broker correctly?

Here's the output of kubectl describe svc kafka-broker:

Name:              kafka-broker
Namespace:         default
Labels:            <none>
Annotations:       <none>
Selector:          app=kafka-broker
Type:              ClusterIP
IP:                10.108.61.90
Port:              <unset>  9092/TCP
TargetPort:        9092/TCP
Endpoints:         172.17.0.7:9092
Session Affinity:  None
Events:            <none>