While working on the last Eventlogging outage, I noticed that we are running a very old version of librdkafka on eventlog1002:
elukey@eventlog1002:~$ dpkg -l | grep kafka ii kafkacat 1.3.0-1+b1 amd64 generic producer and consumer for Apache Kafka ii librdkafka1:amd64 0.9.3-1 amd64 library implementing the Apache Kafka protocol ii python-confluent-kafka 0.9.2-1 amd64 Python client to interact with Kafka - Python 2.7 ii python-kafka 1.4.1-1~stretch1 all Pure Python client for Apache Kafka ii python-pykafka 2.4.0-1~stretch1 amd64 Full-Featured Pure-Python Kafka Client
IIUC confluent-kafka-python uses librdkafka, if so it would be great to deploy the last version in stretch-backports (0.11.5) and possibly package/deploy the latest confluent-kafka-python as well (0.11.5).