Instaclustr product update: General Availability of Managed Kafka Connect
Instaclustr is pleased to announce the general availability of our Managed Kafka Connect offering on the Instaclustr Managed Platform. This service was tested with a select group of early access program customers late last year and since then has been put through its paces in the public preview. It has now passed our stringent testing requirements, security reviews, and our tech support team is ready to support the product with our industry leading SLAs.
Kafka Connect provides a robust connectivity architecture to other data layer products, enabling powerful data pipelines. This enables workflows like new entries in your database flowing through to your Elasticsearch instance. You can find out more on our product page and the previous early access program blog.
General Availability Features
In addition to features available in Kafka Connect preview release, several new capabilities have been added to the service making it a holistic offering catering to most customer production requirements. Below are some key capabilities:
- Kafka Connect 2.4.1 support
- Networking and security
- Provision Kafka Connect cluster as private network cluster
- Link a Kafka Connect cluster with a private network Kafka cluster
- Provision Kafka Connect cluster within an existing VPC where Kafka cluster is deployed
- API support for manually triggering a sync operation on a deployed Connectors
- Access to logs generated by custom Connectors
- Azure cloud support
- Enhanced monitoring including task level metrics
- SOC 2 compliance
- The Terraform provider now supports Instaclustr Managed Kafka Connect
- Dedicated SLA connector which independently monitors the health of the Connect cluster and its connectivity to the linked Kafka cluster.
- Horizontal scaling which allows customers to add and delete nodes in a Connect cluster.
- Additional automation and admin tooling improvements to assist the Technical Operations team to efficiently manage Connect clusters.
- Significant improvements to the deployment and management of BYO Connectors.
- 24×7 comprehensive enterprise support.
- Existing customers with old Kafka Connect clusters will be seamlessly migrated to the GA version.
The two key areas where this release brings significant value addition are security and connector management.
Firstly, from the security perspective, this service is fully compliant with SOC 2 standards like the rest of our offerings. We have also added support to deploy a Kafka Connect cluster within a private network, to link a Kafka Connect cluster to a private network Kafka cluster, and to deploy a Kafka Connect cluster within the same VPC as that of your Kafka cluster.
Secondly, in addition to BYO connectors offered in the preview release, we now have a newly developed AWS S3 connector. Pre-built connectors enable customers to rapidly deploy a Kafka Connect integration. The new, open source, AWS S3 connector was developed from scratch by Instaclustr and will be actively maintained. More pre-built Connectors will be added to the service in subsequent releases based on customer demand. If you need a custom connector don’t hesitate to email us.
Further details on how to provision and deploy a Kafka Connect cluster and custom connectors are available on our support site.
If you want to try our Kafka Connect service, login to our Management Console and try creating a test Kafka Connect cluster and associate it with your Instaclustr managed Kafka cluster. If you haven’t created a Kafka cluster on our Platform, create a test Kafka cluster and use the 30-day free trial. If you’d like a free trial of a Kafka Connect cluster, please contact our Sales team.