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​​​​Confluent Accelerators

While many customers are realizing the potential of the Confluent Streaming Platform for their organization, some have additional requirements for their Kafka implementation. We see these requirements as an opportunity to extend the Platform further with solutions we call Accelerators. These are projects we develop and refine, with the intent we may discover new offerings that may be adopted as products at Confluent.

Accelerators help Confluent customers:

  • Migrate and Upgrade from Legacy Systems
  • Secure and Protect Kafka Clusters
  • Improve Kafka Consumer Efficiency
  • Cluster Planning and Operations

Confluent Service Mesh (CSM)

Confluent Service Mesh (CSM) is a TCP server that acts as an intermediary between a client and a destination. Specifically, it acts as an intermediary between an Apache Kafka client and an Apache Kafka Broker. Unlike other TCP proxies, CSM can encode and decode Kafka Protocol Messages. This encode/decode feature, coupled with the ability to execute signed plugins, positions CSM as a tool for custom solutions to some of the use cases our customers are unable to solve with Kafka alone.

CSM serves as the basis for delivering several Accelerators, including Encryption, Authentication, FLAC enforcement, and Multi-Cluster Routing. Encryption ensures that data is secure and protected from unauthorized access, while Authentication verifies the identity of users and devices. FLAC enforcement ensures that data is properly formatted and validated, and Multi-Cluster Routing enables data to be routed across multiple Kafka clusters.

JMS 2.0 Bridge

The JMS-Bridge is a component that can be used to facilitate quicker migration from legacy JMS based systems to ones built around the Confluent Platform. It is quite common for enterprise systems to use JMS as a means of integrating external applications to a central system. These applications are usually not maintained by the system owners but by external teams which may not share the same goals or priorities of the system team. This creates a problem when the system team wants to migrate away from their legacy JMS vendor to the Confluent Platform since it would require updating all of those external clients.

Event Lineage

The Event Lineage Accelerator is to provide customers the ability to understand the flow of requests and events through a distributed system. This can help identify bottlenecks, data anomalies and how different components of the system interact with each other.

*Event Lineage accelerator is built as an extension of OpenTelemetry Agent and therefore relies on implementation of OpenTelemetry stack

PII

The PII Detection App can be placed in any data pipeline, to redact PII within any message structure, enforcing sub-field level access control in real-time.

The PII ksqlDB UDFs enable data engineers to build their own custom, real-time, PII governance solutions.

The PII Connect SMT enables sensitive data streams to be ingested, while ensuring sensitive data does not touch a Kafka broker.

Eventsizer

Eventsizer is a webapp that takes input about a customer use case and outputs the number of Confluent Platform nodes the use case will need. The calculator also can calculate partitions for a topic and when given hardware, calculate how much scale the hardware is capable of.

Ready to try an accelerator out?

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