Professional Services
Consulting from the company founded by the original developers of Apache Kafka®
Confluent was founded by Apache Kafka’s original developers. Leverage our expert Professional Services team, to employ best practices for your future Kafka deployments and optimize the performance and scalability of existing Kafka clusters.
We offer a range of tailored expert consulting engagements that align with each stage of your project, from inception through to post-production launch:
Planning a new Kafka deployment or developing a Kafka application? Designing systems around real-time data and stream processing can be complex. Our Application Architecture engagement will involve a Confluent Kafka expert working alongside your technical team to assess the upcoming Kafka-based project you’re planning or to review your existing deployment. We’ll share best practices, assess design trade-offs, and flag potential pitfalls to ensure that your team’s projects are designed and built correctly.
The discussion will be catered to your use cases and will involves recommendations and best practices in a variety of areas, including:
Intending to deploy Kafka across multiple data centers (MDC) and/or regions, for geo-replication or disaster recovery? The MDC consulting engagement has a Confluent Kafka expert working with your technical teams to introduce you to MDC concepts, share best practices and known pitfalls. You’ll work through an architectural design, associated component configurations and a deployment plan, evaluating and testing options on your test cluster, to ensure you have everything required to implement successfully.
The security of systems and data is no longer a tickbox exercise, it’s fundamental to every IT system. In the Security consulting engagement, a Confluent Kafka expert will work alongside your technical and security teams to understand your organisation’s specific security requirements and in conjunction, present Kafka security concepts, best practises and pitfalls. The aim of the engagement is to formulate an architectural design and associated component configurations that achieve your security goals. Topics covered include:
Do you have an existing Kafka cluster in production and aim to upgrade to the latest version, to take advantage of new features and bug fixes? The Upgrade engagement will involve a Confluent Kafka expert working alongside your operations and development teams to help prepare for your upgrade. To bring you up to speed with the new features, sharing best practises and known pitfalls. The goal is to understand your existing deployment and to define a robust upgrade plan that maintains your operational SLAs.
This engagement is suitable for those preparing to move into production and those already in production with a Kafka cluster. The goal being to have a Confluent Kafka expert work alongside your technical teams to assess your current Kafka deployment’s health and overall capabilities, making recommendations, to meet the ongoing needs of your organization. The Confluent Kafka expert will forensically analyze system metrics, logs alongside reviewing your business use cases and SLAs to understand the whole picture. The engagement considers a number of critical dimensions for Kafka deployments such as:
Deploying Kafka to AWS is becoming increasingly popular as enterprises default to cloud for their platforms or look to a hybrid on-premises & cloud approach. Within AWS, there are many different permutations for the compute, storage and networking layers, which can all have an effect on the performance and operational characteristics of your clusters. This engagement will provide a Confluent Kafka expert to work alongside your technical teams to assess an upcoming Kafka & Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud deployment. They will assess design trade-offs, share known best practices, and provide the recommendations to your team, based on our own testing and knowledge taken from other existing deployments. The goal is a Kafka deployment optimized for production in AWS which considers the following: