Instaclustr is pleased to announce the Preview release of our fully managed Apache Kafka Connect offering on the Instaclustr Managed Platform.

Apache Kafka Connect is an open source component of the Apache Kafka project. It enables rapid integration of a Kafka cluster with external data sources and sinks with minimal development effort, inherently handling the challenges of developing a linearly scalable clustering solution. A key advantage of Kafka connect is the reusability of Connectors which act as plugins between Kafka and external data sources or sinks. With minimal or no code changes, you can rapidly deploy an open source Kafka Connector suitable for your integration.

Preview Release – Fully Managed Apache Kafka Connect

The Preview release offers a fully automated provisioning and deploying capability including automation of key operations management procedures. It also offers monitoring capability to keep an eye on the health of the Connect cluster and take appropriate actions proactively to mitigate any issues and for capacity planning ahead of an anticipated spike in traffic.

Below are some key points to note about the Preview release –

• Key operational procedures have been automated and built into the Instaclustr Managed Platform – Provisioning, Deletion, Node replacement, etc.
• Each Apache Kafka Connect cluster is created in its own dedicated VPC and can be configured to automatically setup VPC peering with the selected Kafka cluster during provisioning (sharing a VPC with the Kafka cluster is coming soon).
• You may provision in Instaclustr’s cloud account or in your own cloud account.
• Only support AWS cloud. GCP and Azure support to be added for GA.
• BYO Connectors – Customers can deploy their own Connectors. Read this support article to know how to deploy custom Connectors on your Kafka Connect cluster. Please note that some Kafka Connectors available online, although open sourced, may have licensing restrictions. Customers should ensure they have an appropriate licence before using a Connector.
• Key metrics will be monitored and are accessible to our Support team. Some of these metrics are made available to customers through the Instaclustr Management Dashboard. Monitoring API support will be added prior to the GA release.
• 24/7 support is provided. But, complex issues may be deferred depending on SME availability.
• The Preview release comes with a best-effort service with no SLA guarantees (SLAs will be offered in the GA release).
• Clusters created with this release will work with the GA release code when available with no requirement for manual migration.

More details on how to provision and deploy an Apache Kafka Connect cluster and custom Connectors are available on our Support site.

With this preview release, we are offering an instance size (t3.medium) for dev/testing and an instance size (c5.xl) suitable for production. We think this is a good starting point for Kafka Connect usage but may add additional instance types in the future depending on feedback from customers.

As well as adding more features during the preview period, we will be training our support team and making other preparations to ensure our General Availability Kafka Connect offering provides the same rock-solid capability of Instaclustr’s existing Cassandra and Kafka offerings. We also welcome customer feedback in this period to help shape our final offering.

If you already have a Kafka cluster running on our Managed platform, go ahead and try creating a Kafka Connect cluster and start building some integrations. If you are not yet a customer of Instaclustr, go ahead and create an account on the Instaclustr Management Console and make use of a free trial Kafka cluster for 30 days, and then link it to a newly created Kafka Connect cluster to test some of your integrations. If you have any questions about how Kafka Connect can help with integrations or about its pricing, feel free to write to our Support or Customer Success teams. If you have any questions regarding the Product capabilities or specific feature requests, reach us at [email protected].