Instaclustr opens new chapter with Kafka Connect
When you need a (computing) cluster in an instant, who would you call? Perhaps this was the thought process behind the marketing folk at Instaclustr when they decided to give the organization its name.
The company is known for its (arguably fairly huge) 70 million node hours and six petabytes of data that it has under management across its open source technology suite.
So it’s open source, but it’s a) massive amounts of data and it’s b) fully managed data in this case.
The company has now come forward with Instaclustr Managed Kafka Connect as the newest addition to its Instaclustr Managed Platform.
Kafka defined (& Connect)
Apache Kafka is a distributed publish-subscribe messaging system that receives data from disparate source systems and makes the data available to target systems in real time — it is often associated with real-time event stream processing for big data.
Kafka Connect – an open source component of the Apache Kafka project – facilitates integrations between Kafka clusters and external data sources and sinks. The technology uses reusable open source Kafka Connectors that function as plugins between Kafka and other systems.
“By doing so, Kafka Connect solves the core challenges inherent to otherwise developing linearly-scalable streaming data integrators between Kafka and all other systems,” notes Instaclustr.
Instaclustr’s latest Kafka creation is intended to allow data movement between Apache Kafka and other data systems.
Kafka Connect joins Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra, Apache Spark, and Elasticsearch in the stable of open source data technologies managed and supported by Instaclustr.
Pure to the open core
Further here then, Kafka Connect adds to the data-layer technologies Instaclustr delivers in their pure open source versions – a move that is said to give customers an advantageous alternative to ‘open core’ solutions that increase license costs and promote vendor lock-in.
“Interest in Kafka Connect has been growing quickly… and deservedly so,” notes Ben Slater, chief product officer, Instaclustr.
Slater suggests that using Instaclustr, Kafka Connect clusters can be created – and Kafka integrations can begin getting built – within minutes.
Instaclustr includes a collection of pre-built connectors for popular data stores, including for AWS S3. A Bring-Your-Own Kafka Connectors (BYO Connectors) option is also offered.
