It appears that some HttpClient objects are created and never properly closed / disposed of in the KafkaConnect API with the result that we see an eventual increase of heap consumption in the Operator container. After enabling HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError and checking the heap, we observed thousands of io.vertx.core.http.impl.HttpClientImpl and io.vertx.core.http.impl.ConnectionManager objects in the heap, with none in the unreachables, indicating these objects are being kept around after use.