Confluent this week introduced its first commercial product, Confluent Control Center, as part of the newly released Confluent Platform 3.0 and Apache Kafka 0.10.0. The combined package is aimed at operationalizing Kafka-based streaming applications and near real-time data processing efforts.
Neha Narkhede, cofounder and CTO of Confluent (and one of the creators of Kafka), said, “Data has a shelf life of value, and today’s consumers and business users demand immediate, highly personalized, responsive information. Stream data is becoming an organization’s customer interface backbone, fostering true customer intimacy that enables differentiation from competitors. Based on our Kafka expertise we’ve created a powerful, lightweight approach to stream processing.”
(Related: Kafka Summit talks about how few bugs Kafka has)
Kafka 0.10.0 introduces Kafka Streams, a path for developers to write low-latency, scalable, stateless processes for real-time streams of information. These capabilities are bolstered by the new Confluent Control Center, which gives operators a way of managing Kafka clusters and applications.
The Confluent Control Center is also designed to ease integrations. Streams from various sources can be plugged into Kafka for processing, thanks to a host of community-built connectors to popular data sources.
These connectors can be managed and installed through the Confluent Control Center, and thus developers can build out their necessary streams simply by pointing them at Kafka through the Control Center.
Apache Kafka 0.10.0 includes updates ranging from those focusing on Java 8 compatibility, to better rack-aware clustering. Other updates in this version include a new API for restarting tasks, a new ByteBuffer serializer and deserializer, and now file system errors can be found without the need to write first.
