I have implement recently a simple shell script wrapper which uses kt and provides capabilities to use migrations (sort of) with Kafka, like automatic topics creation/deletion/reconfiguration, etc.

There is a common situation to create a lot of topics and during that Kafka may answer a little bit longer, which causes all subsequent operation to fail with the following error:

failed to create topic err=kafka server: Request exceeded the user-specified time limit in the request.

The default limit is 3s in Sarama, and it happens to be not enough quite often.

I've added the ability to configure this timeout via -timeout flag of kt admin command, or via KT_ADMIN_TIMEOUT env var globally.