Confluent Releases 3.1 with Apache Kafka

Confluent, which offers a streaming data platform founded by the team that built Apache Kafka, has announced the release of Confluent 3.1. The new release features an expanded Control Center plus many new features and bug fixes, the company said in a blog post.

“The lack of efficient and operable data rebalancing and multi-datacenter replication functionalities in Kafka have been a pain point for many customers, and we have addressed these in our most recent Confluent Enterprise release with the addition of Automatic Data Balancing and Multi-datacenter replication,” the company said in a blog post. “In addition, we have built more connectors (Elasticsearch and JDBC Sink), introduced a new high performing Go Client, and have addressed critical bug fixes to other Confluent open source components.”

Automatic Data Balancing helps alleviate the problems caused by unbalanced workloads across data center resources. As clusters grow, the growth rate of topics and partitions is uneven. Some brokers are underused while others are overtaxed. ADB monitors clusters and shifts data to create a more even workload, the company stated.

Multi-datcenter Replication is designed to make it easier to maintain multiple Kafka clusters in multiple data systems, such as for cloud migration and centralized analytics.

Confluent Control Center, meanwhile, now has the ability to define alerts on the latency and completeness of streams. These alerts can be delivered via email or from a centralized alerting system. The improved control center can also be integrated with enterprise authentication systems and stream monitoring is now extended to topics across multiple Kafka clusters, according to the blog post.

Confluent 3.1 also features two new connectors, JDBC Sink and ElasticSearch Sink and one new client, Go Client. The update is available now on Confluent’s website.