Introducing StreamNative Cloud for KafkaⓇ

We’re excited to announce StreamNative Cloud for Kafka^Ⓡ. This cloud-native managed service is built upon Apache Pulsar and provides a fully compliant Kafka API implementation (without the limits of Kafka). It supports millions of topics with consistent low latency.

In 2020, StreamNative released Kafka-on-Pulsar (KoP) to the open-source community. This project, co-developed with companies like Tencent, re-implemented the Kafka API inside Pulsar, allowing Kafka developers and operators to leverage Pulsar’s cloud-native architecture and advantages. Since that time, KoP has continued to mature and helps teams to fix the pain points of Kafka without having to change their application code.

In parallel, StreamNative has continued to develop our cloud offering, which gives customers the unique ability to run a fully managed cluster either in the StreamNative Cloud or in their own cloud. The newly released simplified provisioning process and enhancements to the networking model are improvements that help support KoP and the evolution of StreamNative Cloud.

StreamNative Cloud for Kafka^Ⓡ builds on the foundation of KoP, and provides a fully-managed Kafka API with all of the existing functionality of Apache Pulsar. Bringing these technologies together enables teams to seamlessly scale and support millions of topics. By utilizing StreamNative Cloud for Kafka^Ⓡ, your existing Kafka applications and services can leverage the benefits of Pulsar’s architecture - without complex code modifications - while new applications gain the benefits of Pulsar’s flexible messaging model.

In addition to fully supporting the Kafka API, StreamNative Cloud for Kafka^Ⓡ utilizes Pulsar’s built-in multi-tenancy and geo-replication capabilities. Teams no longer need to design work-arounds to share a Kafka cluster, instead, Pulsar’s inclusion of tenants, namespaces, and enforceable policies allows for a robust model to share a cluster. This model improves cluster utilization and simplifies sharing data, especially in event-driven architectures and micro-services based applications. Geo-replication, (currently in beta in StreamNative Cloud,) allows for global applications with a single API to configure a shared namespace across regions or cloud providers.

For users who need to interconnect with a large number of systems, the combined ecosystems of Pulsar and Kafka are now available to them. Third party APIs and integrations that communicate over the Kafka protocol can now communicate directly to a Kafka-enabled StreamNative cluster, while teams continue to develop their applications using Pulsar’s flexible, unified messaging API.

StreamNative is excited to see what teams are able to build with the combined power of Pulsar’s cloud-native architecture and the reach and breadth of the Kafka API. Today, we are launching the StreamNative Cloud for Kafka^Ⓡ feature as a private beta. You can sign up for the beta and learn more here.