Skip to main content
13 Dec 2022

Cloud-Native Apache Kafka Service

There is a rise in demand for fully managed Kafka as a cloud service. It's time to harness the power of fully managed Kafka as a cloud-native service. Kafka is one of the most powerful, flexible and enterprise-ready message brokers ever developed. If you are a manager or sysadmin of a large scale IT infrastructure, you know that there is no better time than now to harness its power.

Kafka products were designed to meet the needs of a broad array of companies, including large enterprises and small start-ups. Need a reliable and scalable way to send and store data in real-time? Introducing managed services that let you leverage the power of Kafka without worrying about your infrastructure or ongoing maintenance tasks.

The Managed Kafka cloud service gives organizations the ability to run their own managed Kafka cluster with advanced features like KSQL for SQL support within Kafka, support for Schema-on-Record (SOR) within HTTP/2 transactions and KSQL transactions, as well as use cases including publish/subscribe and batch data ingest.

Most Kafka users are either maintaining their own Kafka clusters or using external services for Kafka deployments. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. If you're like most commercial enterprises, your data is probably not directly accessible from the cloud and needs to be transformed into a stream of events/messages which can then be consumed by third party applications.

Why You Need to Move to a Cloud-Native Apache Kafka Service

Building the rich customer experiences and data-driven operations that provide a competitive advantage for your business requires fully leveraging the actionable insights from your data. However, managing Kafka can be a burden on your DevOps teams and Developers, as well as a distraction from their core projects.

Kafka provides a powerful and flexible real-time messaging infrastructure, but it can be difficult to take advantage of the full potential of Kafka. This can be addressed by moving Kafka's operational burden to a fully managed cloud service.

You may already have done this with other data infrastructure components, such as storage, data warehousing and databases: Amazon S3, EC2, BigQuery and Snowflake are examples. Now it's time to do the same with Kafka with Confluent Cloud.

Fully Managed Kafka Services

When fine-tuning your Kafka cluster, several considerations must be taken into account. Establishing the proper benchmarks to ensure optimal performance and productivity from your cluster can be a strenuous process requiring substantial resources.

A managed Kafka service provider can deliver the experience of using Apache Kafka without requiring complete knowledge of how to operate it - which can lead to efficiency.

  • Monitor the performance of your Kafka cluster by keeping tabs on key metrics. Create alerts to provide accurate results, and explore all available options
  • Deliver SLA responses with 99% uptime guarantees to ensure fault-resilient system performance
  • In-depth knowledge of all the latest technology trends, including any new features or debugging, as well as active participation for progress reporting and discussions about the eco-system's future direction
  • Providing scalable, elastic resources on demand without requiring complex sizing
  • Retain all Kafka data, with no limits, by decoupling storage from compute
  • Connect and process your business data in real time anywhere with fully managed Kafka cloud native services

Kafka is a streaming platform that is changing how people engage with services. Fine-tuning your Kafka cluster can greatly improve performance and recovery time in the event of failures. With managed Kafka services, the process of utilizing Kafka can be expedient and hassle-free.

Final Thoughts

Kafka is a powerful distributed open-source messaging service that can run in public cloud or on premises. It was designed to be resilient and to support high volume of enterprise data. Kafka is highly scalable, so it can handle large amounts of data with high accuracy.

CIGNEX offers fully managed Kafka cloud services for enterprise. Our service helps customers meet their high availability and throughput requirements for critical business applications by providing them with the most fault-tolerant, secure, high-grade service available today.

We encourage you to test out Kafka on your own, in either cloud or on premise deployment configurations before making a long-term decision about an enterprise platform.