Recently, Confluent announced the general availability (GA) of Confluent for Kubernetes, a complete, declarative API-driven experience for deploying and self-managing Confluent Platform as a cloud-native system. With Confluent for Kubernetes, the company packages its event-streaming platform into Kubernetes and provides a Cloud-Native offering.
The GA release of Confluent for Kubernetes offers declarative APIs allowing users to define the desired state of their infrastructure and applications. The APIs also provide handling of infrastructures through declarative specs for scaling, upgrades to the latest Confluent Platform release, fault tolerance, and platform configuration automation for strong authentication, authorization, and network encryption - as well as creating the set of access controls and TLS certificates required by Confluent services to operate.
Source: https://www.confluent.io/blog/confluent-for-kubernetes-offers-cloud-native-kafka-automation/
Users can extend the Kubernetes API through CustomResourceDefinitions to support the management of Confluent services and data plane resources, such as Kafka topics and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) role bindings.
apiVersion: platform.confluent.io/v1beta1
kind: KafkaTopic
metadata:
name:
namespace: confluent
spec:
replicas: 1
partitionCount: 1
configs:
cleanup.policy: "delete"
In a Confluent blog post, the author Rohit Bakashi, product manager, Confluent for Kubernetes, explained the GitOps aspect for the declarative specs:
These declarative specs enable you to express the state of your infrastructure and application state as code—as a collection of YAML files. You can check these YAML files into a Git repository so that your teams can collaborate on managing these environments. With CI/CD systems, the YAML files can be pulled from Git to deploy updates to the Confluent environments in development, QA, and then production.
Last year Confluent brought their platform to various public cloud vendor marketplaces as Confluent Cloud. The offering is available in the Azure-, AWS, and GCP Marketplace. Furthermore, the company strengthens its partnership with Microsoft at the beginning of this year. The company with Confluent for Kubernetes now provides a platform that brings cloud-native capabilities to data streams in private infrastructures. When a company transitions to the cloud or needs to keep workloads on-premise, they can leverage the Confluent platform.
In a Confluent press release, Ganesh Srinivasan, chief product and engineering officer at Confluent, said:
To compete in the digital realm, organizations need to quickly deliver personalized customer experiences and real-time operations, which are only possible with access to data from all environments and cloud-native advantages. For organizations that need to operate on-premises, we’re bringing the benefits of cloud computing to their private infrastructure with Confluent for Kubernetes. Now, any company can build a private cloud service to move data across their business regardless of its environment.
Enterprises can leverage Confluent for Kubernetes for a 30-day trial period without a license key before requiring one and closing a contract for enterprise support. And lastly, the company will enhance the product with a single pane of glass to view operational status across multiple environments, with the ability to drill down into each environment, and a GUI and CLI interface to deploy and manage Confluent across environments.