Important

You are viewing documentation for an older version of Confluent Platform. For the latest, click here.

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.

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¶

Operator 1.6.0 is released with Confluent Platform 5.5. For the compatibility information with any other versions of Confluent Platform, see Kubernetes.

Confluent Operator automates the deployment and management of Confluent Platform in the following environments:

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) cluster running on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster running on Microsoft Azure (Azure)
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (3.13 or later) (see note below)
Pivotal Container Service (PKS) (1.2 to 1.6)
Vanilla Kubernetes (1.13 to 1.15) cluster

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 Operator and Confluent Platform 5.5. After downloading the bundle, click the v5.3.2 tab at the bottom of this page and use the Helm 2 instructions for OpenShift deployments.

Architecture¶

The following shows the high-level architecture of Operator and Confluent Platform components in a Kubernetes cluster.

Hands-on demos¶

The following demos show you deployments of Confluent Platform on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) leveraging Confluent Operator:

Suggested resource¶

Learn about the detailed architecture for deploying the Confluent Platform on Kubernetes with Confluent Operator in Confluent Platform Reference Architecture for Kubernetes.

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.