Confluent Operator
Confluent Operator allows you to deploy and manage Confluent Platform as a cloud-native, stateful
container application on Kubernetes and OpenShift. The automation provided by
Kubernetes, Operator, and Helm greatly simplifies provisioning and minimizes the
burden of operating and managing Confluent Platform clusters. Operator also provides you with the
portability to use Apache Kafka® in multiple provider zones and across both your
private and public cloud environments.
Tip
Take a sneak peak
into the next generation of Operator.
The following video provides an introduction to Confluent Operator. See Introduction to Kubernetes and Confluent Operator for additional Kubernetes and Confluent Operator videos.
Features
- Deploying
- Automates Confluent Platform deployment using Helm.
- Automates Confluent Platform management.
- Uses default Kubernetes StorageClass-based provisioners for persistent volume storage (such as Google persistent disks, AWS EBS, and Azure disk storage).
- Automates cluster authentication and security configuration using:
- SASL/PLAIN with TLS certificates
- TLS two-way (mutual) authentication
- TLS in-transit encryption for all deployed components.
- Updating and upgrading
- Provides automated rolling updates for configuration changes.
- Provides automated rolling upgrades with no impact to Kafka availability.
- Scaling
- Provides elastic scaling for new Confluent Platform components (with manual rebalancing).
- Resiliency
- Restores a Kafka pod with the same Kafka broker ID, configuration, and persistent storage volumes if a failure occurs.
- Monitoring
- Supports metrics aggregation using JMX/Jolokia.
- Supports aggregated metrics export to Prometheus.
Supported environments
Kubernetes versions
Confluent Operator 1.7.0 supports Kubernetes versions 1.16 to 1.19 with any Cloud
Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) conformant offering.
A full list of CNCF conformant Kubernetes offerings can be found here.
The following API must be present in your Kubernetes:
apiextensions.k8s.io/v1beta1
You can run the following command to check. The output should include
apiextensions.k8s.io/v1beta1
:
kubectl api-versions | grep apiextensions.k8s.io
Important
Red Hat OpenShift support: Red Hat includes official support for Helm 3 starting with OpenShift version 4.4. If you are using an older version of OpenShift, you need to use Helm 2 to deploy Confluent Platform using Operator 1.7. After downloading the bundle, select cp-5.3.2 from the version picker on this page and use the Helm 2 instructions for OpenShift deployments.
Confluent Platform versions
Confluent Operator 1.7.0 supports Confluent Platform versions 6.0.x and 6.1.x.
Architecture
The following shows the high-level architecture of Operator and Confluent Platform components in a
Kubernetes cluster.
Licensing
You can use Confluent Operator and Confluent Control Center for a 30-day trial period without a license key.
After 30 days, Operator and Control Center require a license key. Confluent issues keys
to subscribers, along with providing enterprise-level support for Confluent Platform and Confluent Operator. If you are a
subscriber, please contact Confluent Support at support@confluent.io for more
information.
See Add a license key if you have received a key for Confluent Operator.