Conduktor Launches 2.0 Platform Enhancing Kafka Ecosystem Management with Free, Immediate Insights

April 12, 2024 — Conduktor has announced its 2.0 Platform, which introduces a completely new model to help developers and organizations worldwide gain immediate insight into their Kafka ecosystem for free.

This announcement comes amidst the 2023-24 State of Streaming Data report identifying AI/ML as the primary trend driving adoption and expansion of streaming data usage, with 72% of respondents citing AI/ML in their use cases for data streaming over the next 12-24 months.

Nicolas Orban, CEO of Conduktor, commented: “All developers working with Kafka need access to essential tooling to debug, troubleshoot, and monitor their streaming applications, regardless of whether they’re hobbyists, working at a scale-up, or within a large Enterprise. We believe it’s more important than ever for developers to be well-equipped to work with these technologies. Our true north has always been to accelerate the adoption of data streaming, and Conduktor 2.0 represents the next chapter.”

The New Standard for Teams Working with Kafka

Conduktor is a vendor-agnostic solution, meaning it supports all managed and self-hosted Kafka implementations, both cloud and on-premise. Originating from a single-user Desktop application that gained strong community attraction since the 2019 Kafka Summit, the focus has shifted in recent years towards a centrally deployed stack that promotes collaboration between Platform teams, Architects and Application Developers.

Conduktor’s vision has adjusted to account for this, pivoting to harness Data Mesh principles as a guiding force for breaking down organizational silos and promoting real-time data innovation. In doing so, they aim to connect all of the people, processes and data that are involved in the Kafka ecosystem.

Marcos Rodriguez, Domain Architect at Lufthansa, commented: “Conduktor simplifies things; and we need this simplicity in our landscape. It helps speed up our daily operations, and helps us with credit card data (PCI DSS) by encrypting the topics. Conduktor, in one sentence, for me, is Kafka made simpler”

Conduktor recently embedded a Kafka proxy into their platform, which provides platform teams and architects greater control over how Kafka is used inside an organization. This can be used to enforce Governance, Security and bring Auditing capabilities, which aren’t available natively with Apache Kafka. Consequently, Conduktor has 4x’ed the number of customers using their Enterprise products in the last 12 months.

The Symbiotic Relationship Between AI and Data Streaming

The mutually beneficial relationship between AI and data streaming is clear. AI algorithms rely heavily on vast amounts of timely data; learning and adapting as real-time events are processed from the ever-pervasive landscape of IoT devices and sensors.

Conduktor 2.0 provides developers with visibility and control over the underlying Kafka cluster, its resources, data, and associated streaming applications. This boosts confidence in navigating a middleware technology that operates at a higher level of abstraction than traditional software applications.

Making Kafka Development Accessible to All

This new model introduced as part of the 2.0 announcement, makes the most fundamental aspects of Conduktor’s platform free to use without limitation. That’s data exploration, troubleshooting, and management of Kafka clusters, Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, ACLs, and ksqlDB. It also includes SSO (Single Sign-On), acknowledging the need to collaborate with teammates for a better experience when developing streaming applications.

About Conduktor

Conduktor encompasses data mesh principles to promote collaboration between Platform teams, Architects, and Application Developers working with Apache Kafka. This provides developers the freedom to innovate, create, and collaborate, while Platform teams are comfortable knowing that rules are in place to mitigate risk. Conduktor does not replace your managed Kafka provider or on-prem Kafka infrastructure; rather, it helps augment it. Conduktor provides Console, a control plane to accelerate the productivity of users interacting with Kafka, and Gateway, a Kafka proxy that acts on the data plane to provide enhanced governance and security.

Source: Conduktor