Announcement
Conduktor is thrilled to announce significant updates to its platform including an epic expansion of its free tier.
This expansion goes beyond a mere upgrade—it's a revolution in how we approach the Kafka ecosystem. Conduktor 2.0 sets a new course towards success for teams and organizations by demystifying the complexities that are commonly associated with Apache Kafka.
Conduktor is the only platform dedicated to promoting better collaboration between Platform Teams, Architects and Developers.
Making everyone successful with Apache Kafka
From today, we are opening our free tier to make most features accessible, removing prior limits, and providing some security features to get started. In doing so, we aim to provide everything that you and your team need to adopt Conduktor long-term, regardless of your data streaming maturity. The beginning of the journey is critical, and we believe you’ll be in good hands with us.
As your needs evolve and demand for more sophisticated solutions arise, rest assured, Conduktor will be ready to support your journey into the broader expanse of data streaming solutions.
Today’s announcement marks our ongoing commitment to serving our roots, the developer community.
“All developers working with Kafka need access to essential tooling to debug, troubleshoot and monitor their streaming applications. Regardless of whether they’re a hobbyist, working at a scale-up or within a large Enterprise.”
Nicolas Orban
CEO
Conduktor is a vendor-agnostic solution, meaning it supports all managed and self-hosted Kafka implementations, both cloud and on-premise.
Collaborative Kafka Development Platform
It’s been an exciting ride since the general availability of Console 18 months ago, which has since seen 15 releases that maximize the developer experience, creating the ultimate control plane for managing your Kafka resources and its data.
Additionally, the Conduktor platform now incorporates an innovative Kafka proxy to help secure streaming data and protect the Kafka infrastructure, providing Platform teams and Architects greater controls over how Kafka is used inside an organization.
Alongside that, we are today announcing a CLI to enable self-service of Kafka resources and promote cross-team data sharing through a GitOps approach.
“Conduktor simplifies things; and we need this simplicity in our landscape. It helps speed up our daily operations, and helps us with credit card data (PCI DSS) by encrypting the topics. Conduktor, in one sentence, for me, is Kafka made simpler.”
Marcos Rodriguez
Domain Architect at Lufthansa
Visibility into Kafka in a secure, controlled environment
While deploying applications using Kafka is relatively easy, troubleshooting them and exploring your Kafka data is more difficult if you’re not well-equipped.
Ever wondered if your application is lagging? Had to trace a missing orderId? Restart a failed Connect task? These are the sort of problems our Console will help you resolve in an instant.
Working on a unified platform that offers all essential tools leads to knowledge sharing, standardizes workflows, and facilitates collaboration, enabling developers and platform teams to build together more effectively.
We’ve added a host of exciting features to improve the developer experience on Kafka, and bring greater control to platform administrators in Console.
User experience
Richer controls to personalize your experience and bring in the metrics that matter most to you through interactive data tables
Performance on large clusters
Index metadata to limit making many AdminClient calls to Kafka. This is particularly efficient on customers with 1000s of developers and 1TB+ topics!
Drill deep into the topic data
Advanced filtering techniques to help you find a needle in a haystack. JSON, Avro, Protobuf, custom deserializer, we cover it all to speed up data exploration.
CLI, APIs & Automation
Manage users, groups, permissions and Kafka resources via the Console REST API or Conduktor CLI. Developers will thank you for having Kafka Connect auto-restart.
Going beyond basic ACLs: RBAC
Don’t want Kafka to be an open bar? RBAC has you covered, moving beyond ACLs (topics and consumers only) and enabling Platform teams to manage permissions for all Kafka resources at user and group level.
Embedded Monitoring & Alerting
Prometheus? Grafana? Datadog? JMX? What should the dashboards look like? No more thinking. Conduktor Monitoring works out of the box with no agent dependency.
Deploy Console in minutes using Docker, Kubernetes or CloudFormation.
Automate processes and democratize data with Kafka Self-Serve
Kafka usage spreads like wildfire (in a good way!). One successful project sparks interest and use cases amongst other teams, keen to improve their decision-making and not be left behind.
But as streaming spreads across different teams and business units, how do you avoid the central Platform team becoming a bottleneck?
Conduktor’s Self-Service solution simplifies and automates processes, facilitating better collaboration between Platform teams and Application teams through a GitOps approach.
So, how does it all work?
Well, we love the idea of Platform teams sipping cocktails on the beach, and not sat approving every PR for new Kafka resources or a change in partitions.
Platform teams define the rules of the game, enforcing naming conventions and restricting expensive configurations. This permits ownership to be delegated to Application teams, who are free to create and manage their own domain data in a safe, controlled environment via UI, GitOps, or CLI.
Beyond that, we also want to solve the challenge of discovering, and sharing, your domain data with other teams to provide a self-service approach and drive data innovation. So once a team is granted ownership, they now have permissions to grant access to other teams, without involving the central Platform team.
That sounds like a better way of working, right!
New ways to secure and govern the streaming data plane
Kafka is easy to get started, but in the beginning, security is not a primary concern and neither is how to govern your environment.
But as the ecosystem grows, so too does the number of teams and domains to onboard, the number of streaming applications and the volume of data to regulate. The integration complexity is increasing, you have to support more languages, and build more client SDKs to support your organizational constraints. Before long, your company is pedalling backwards, trying to implement bespoke solutions to paper over the cracks.
Solving these growing pains is the DNA behind Conduktor.
At Conduktor, we have a unique way of protecting your whole Kafka infrastructure, no matter your Kafka provider. We have built an enterprise-hardened Kafka proxy which is fully Kafka-wire compatible. This permits companies to strengthen their security posture on Kafka like never before, and drive scalable processes to maximize operational efficiency.
This powerful architectural framework offers functionality that is not available natively with Apache Kafka.
The new way of working with Kafka
End-to-End Encryption
Without any client-side change, encrypt full Kafka payload or specific fields. Integrate with any KMS, to ensure your data is encrypted both in transit and at rest. Regulations.
Safeguard your Kafka
Prevent the most common Kafka mistakes and undesirable client configurations (compression, acks, …). Enforce best practices to ensure the availability of your data and protect your Kafka infrastructure (connection rates, throttling, schemas, overcommit…)
Elevate your Data Quality
Validating data types with a Schema Registry is nice but what about the data type constraints? (minimum, maximum, patterns, formats etc.). Prevent poor data in Kafka.
Virtual Clusters over Physical Clusters
Turn a single cluster into many isolated, secure, virtual clusters for a unique approach to multi-tenancy to simplify your security and maximize your infrastructure usage.
SQL Topics at no cost
We all know SQL. Create virtual topics through SQL statements for simple projections that don’t warrant complex pipelines and cost absolutely $0.
Cache your data
Kafka is immutable. Eliminate latency and data duplication by caching data at the edge, near your Point of Presence (PoP). Crucial for efficient global operations.
The Next Chapter: Embracing Data Mesh
Managing Kafka infrastructure is a solved problem handled by leading experts in the industry. But Kafka itself is not enough to succeed. Within an organization, the focus is about delivering projects and democratizing real-time data to maximize its benefits. This requires connecting individuals, implementing processes, and enforcing policies. This remains a significant hurdle.
This is what the Data Mesh principles are highlighting. At Conduktor, our focus for the upcoming years will be to intensify efforts in these areas. We aim to democratize data access across the organization, promote self-service, and assist in implementing a federated governance model to maintain control.
Data streaming isn't going anywhere. Real-time applications and services are what makes a business competitive and help to provide a great customer experience. Our mission is to accelerate how enterprises get there efficiently.
Maximizing Kafka & Conduktor Impact with our trusted partners
Conduktor collaborates closely with leading solution integrators, ensuring our clients benefit from optimal usage and best practices. Our partners are pivotal in helping customers unlock the full potential of Kafka and Conduktor, offering tailored support and innovative solutions for every need.
