UPDATED 07:00 EDT / SEPTEMBER 28 2016

NEWS

Confluent retools Kafka for traditional enterprises

As the Apache open source software Kafka continues to gain traction among large organizations for its ability to handle streaming data such as Twitter feeds, their requirements are becoming an increasingly important priority in the project’s roadmap. Confluent Inc. set out to address some of those demands today by adding new automation features to its commercial version of the message broker that promise to make it work better in large enterprise environments.

The first capability introduced in the update is a data balancing mechanism that can optimize the distribution of information in a Kafka cluster with minimal manual input. According to Confluent, the feature frees up administrators to focus on other work while improving resource utilization. It also promises to lower the risk of service disruptions in the process by mitigating the impact of individual server outages.

The feature is complemented by a new replication capability that promises to streamline the flow of information in large Kafka deployments spread out across multiple data centers. It expands upon the MirrorMaker synchronization tool included in the upstream project with features that the vendor says make its distributor more “reliable, highly available, asynchronous and scalable.” Plus, the distribution provides better support for remote clusters thanks to a new cloud connector that is rolling out in conjunction.

Confluent says that the addition can make it easier for organizations to coordinate the on- and off-premise components of their deployments and even help with migrations if necessary. The vendor sees the latter feature finding use mainly in situations where a company wants to move an in-house Kafka cluster to the cloud for cost reduction purposes, but data can also be transferred the other way around if needed.

The new features are expected to become available at the end of October. Confluent is previewing the changes at the Strata + Hadoop World conference in New York this week.

Image via Pixabay

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