Instaclustr announces that our Managed Apache Kafka on the Instaclustr Managed Platform has now reached General Availability with full production SLAs and security controls applied. Apache Kafka adds to Instaclustr’s existing open source offerings of Apache Cassandra, and Elassandra, providing customers the opportunity to use a single managed service provider for a complete suite of leading open source data processing and storage technologies delivering reliability at scale.

Apache Kafka is the leading streaming and queuing technology for large-scale, always-on applications. Apache Kafka is widely used in applications architectures to fill needs including:

• Provide a buffering mechanism in front of a processing (i.e. deal with temporary incoming message rate greater than processing app can deal with)
• Allow producers to publish messages with guaranteed delivery even if the consumers are down when the message is published
• As an event store for events sourcing or Kappa architecture
• Facilitating flexible, configurable architectures with many producers -> many consumers by separating the details who what is consuming messages for the apps that produce them (and vice-versa)
• Performing stream analytics (with Kafka Streams)

Delivered through the Instaclustr Platform, Instaclustr’s Managed Apache Kafka provides the management features that have made Instaclustr’s Managed Apache Cassandra the leading managed service for Cassandra:

• Support on AWS, Azure, GCP and IBM cloud
• Automated provisioning and configuration of clusters with Kafka and Zookeeper
• Run in our cloud provider account with a fixed, infrastructure inclusive, cost or use your own cloud provider account
• Provision, configure and monitor your cluster using the Instaclustr Console or REST APIs.
• Management of access via IP ranges or security groups.
• Option of connection to your cluster using public IPs or private IPs and VPC peering.
• Private network clusters with no public IPs.
• Highly responsive, enterprise-grade, 24×7 support from Instaclustr’s renowned support team.

Enhancements for the General Availability milestone include:

• Instaclustr Console functionality to allow management of Kafka user accounts (to be released next week);
• Topic-levels metrics available through the Instaclustr console and monitoring API;
• Automated daily backup of configuration data from Zookeeper;
• Internal security enhancements to bring our Kafka offering up to the standards required for our SOC2 certification, bringing SOC2 to our Managed Kafka offering.

Instaclustr has been running Apache Kafka in production for internal use since 2017 and for the last few months working with Early Access Program customers Siteminder, Lendi, Kaiwoo and Paidy to ensure our offering is well suited to a range of customer requirements.

Our early access program has already delivered benefits to participating customers such as Lendi:

“We see Apache Kafka as a core capability for our architectural strategy as we scale our business. Getting set up with Instaclustr’s Kafka service was easy and significantly accelerated our timelines. Instaclustr consulting services were also instrumental in helping us understand how to properly use Kafka in our architecture.” Glen McRae, CTO, Lendi

and Siteminder:

“As very happy users of Instaclustr’s Cassandra managed services, we’re excited about the new Apache Kafka managed service. Instaclustr quickly got us up and running with Kafka and provided the support we needed throughout the process.” Mike Rogers, CTO, SiteMinder

With this general availability milestone, Instaclustr’s Managed Kafka is ready for full production usage with SLAs available up to 99.95%. Our technical operations team is ready to migrate existing Kafka clusters to Instaclustr with zero downtime.

For more information on Instaclustr’s Managed Apache Kafka offering please contact [email protected] or sign up for a free trial.