Kcat is a generic non-JVM producer and consumer for Apache Kafka 0.8, think of it as a netcat for Kafka.

In producer mode kcat reads messages from stdin, delimited with a configurable delimiter and produces them to the provided Kafka cluster, topic and partition. In consumer mode kcat reads messages from a topic and partition and prints them to stdout using the configured message delimiter.

kcat also features a Metadata list mode to display the current state of the Kafka cluster and its topics and partitions.