Confluent Operator

Attention

Confluent Operator, versions 1.7.x, 1.6.x, and 1.5.x, are End-of-Support as of April 2022. Plan migrating to Confluent for Kubernetes. See Migrate to Confluent for Kubernetes for the steps to migrate from Operator 1.x to CFK 2.x.

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.
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 1.6.2 supports Kubernetes versions 1.15 to 1.18 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 1.6. 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 1.6.2 supports Confluent Platform versions 5.5.x and 6.0.x.

Architecture

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

_images/co-architecture.png

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.