Confluent Announces Kafka for the Enterprise with Multi-Datacenter Replication

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Confluent Enterprise latest version supports multi-datacenter (MDC) replication, automatic data balancing, and cloud migration capability. Confluent, provider of the Apache Kafka based streaming platform, announced last week the new features for Confluent Enterprise, to help build streaming data pipelines and develop stream processing applications.

The new release, available at the end of this month, includes two versions of Confluent:

• Confluent Open Source: This is the open source version. It includes Apache Kafka as well as clients for C, C++, Python and Go programming languages. It also packages the connectors for JDBC, ElasticSearch, and HDFS, a Schema Registry for managing metadata for Kafka topics and a REST Proxy for integrating with web applications.
• Confluent Enterprise: This is the enterprise offering which provides additional capabilities for developing enterprise streaming applications. It includes the Confluent Control Center for monitoring of event streams, MDC replication, and auto data balancing.

The new data replication and data balancing capabilities help with better management of the Kafka clusters.

Multi-datacenter replication: The multi-datacenter (MDC) replication allows to set up secure multi-cluster replication and maintain clusters in different geographical locations with centralized configuration. Kafka clusters in each datacenter are synchronized so applications and configurations in separate datacenters are kept in sync.

It provides durable cross-datacenter replication and integrates with security capabilities in Apache Kafka to encrypt and authenticate the replicated data. The replication can be done for the whole cluster or a subset of topics.

MDC replication comes with complete security support and includes automatic replication of access control across data centers. Authentication is SASL supported with Kerberos and Active Directory integration. Authorization enables MDC streaming replication by topic. And encryption is based on SSL and Mirror Maker.

Automatic Data Balancing: The auto data balancing feature allows to add and remove nodes from the Kafka cluster so you can shift data to create even workloads across the cluster. It monitors the cluster statistics like number of nodes, size of partitions, number of partitions and number of leaders in the cluster and uses rack aware algorithms that rebalance the partitions across the cluster.

Cloud migration: The cloud support in Confluent Enterprise product helps with creatting data streams to the cloud or back and also synchronize cloud clusters with on-premise Kafka clusters. Based on Confluent replication this capability gives the organizations to transition from one cloud strategy to another in the future.

If you are interested in learning more about the new features, you can sign up for the upcoming webinar or the recently launched free online talk series.

Related Topics:

• Development
• Architecture & Design
• AI, ML & Data Engineering
• Asynchronous Architecture
• Confluent
• Event Stream Processing
• Streaming
• Apache Kafka
• Big Data
• Messaging

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