.. _migrate-kafka:

Migrate an Existing |ak| Deployment
======================================

Confluent is committed to supporting and developing the open source |ak-tm|
project. The version of |ak| in |cp| is fully compatible with
the matching open source version and only contains additional patches for
critical bugs when |cp| and |ak| release schedules do
not align. An existing cluster can typically be upgraded easily by
performing a :ref:`rolling restart <rolling_restart>` of |ak| brokers.


Migrating developer tools
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The rest of |cp| can be added incrementally. Start by adding
|sr| and updating your applications to use the Avro
serializer. Next, add the REST Proxy to support applications that
may not have access to good |ak| clients or Avro libraries. Run the HDFS
connector to load data from |ak| into HDFS continuously.

Migrating to Control Center
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

You can also migrate an existing cluster to take advantage of |c3-short|. Simply deploy
|c3-short| on a server, configure the server to communicate with your cluster, add
interceptors to your Connect instance, producers, and consumers, and you're ready to go.