Product Updates [June 2023]:  Improved Onboarding for Cluster Set Up and Kafka Clients

See what's new this month for StreamNative Cloud!

We’ve been working on a better console experience to improve time to value for new users to start using Pulsar - both for initial cluster creation and set up as well as connecting to an existing cluster using Kafka clients and tools.  AND…Pulsar 3.0 is also available on StreamNative Cloud so that organizations can take advantage of improved performance at scale with the new load balancer and other enhancements.  Read on for all the details.

New Onboarding Guide for Managed Clusters

Pulsar is a powerful and sophisticated tool and StreamNative Cloud enables teams to set up and connect to their organization’s Pulsar clusters in a matter of minutes - and without needing to understand all of the underlying configurations.  In this release, we’ve focused on making this flow even easier with a step by step onboarding guide [with videos] to enable new users to quickly set up, authenticate and connect to a Pulsar cluster on our hosted/managed service.

• Create a service account: service accounts let teams connect their applications to Pulsar clusters. ****watch video
• Create an instance and deploying a Pulsar cluster: instances let teams specify settings, and create/deploy a Pulsar cluster. ****watch video
• View the default tenants and namespaces, and learning about multi-tenancy: tenants let multiple teams securely use the same Pulsar cluster without interfering with each other. ****watch video
• Create a topic: topics are how messages are grouped within Pulsar clusters, and . ****watch video
• Set up a Pulsar client and send the first message to it: send messages to a Pulsar cluster via a client library or CLI tool. watch video

With streamlined onboarding, teams can unlock the full potential of StreamNative Cloud from day one. The guide can be viewed by creating an account, or reaching out to the StreamNative team.

Improved experience for running Kafka Applications with StreamNative Cloud

As teams move to centralize their messaging and streaming services to Pulsar from legacy technologies - such as Kafka - we’re making it easier for developers to connect to their Pulsar clusters on the StreamNative Console.

• Kafka developers can now easily connect to their Pulsar cluster with Kafka clients via a new Kafka Clients page. This page walks a user through a step by step guide to connect to the Organization’s Pulsar cluster using authentication tokens or OAuth2 and setting up
• Client libraries (Java, Go, Python, and Node.js),
• Apache Kafka CLI tools, KStream applications, KSQL

• Also, the Kafka protocol is now enabled by default on all new managed Pulsar clusters (Hosted + BYOC), so teams can get right to work.

Lean more about how the Kafka protocol on StreamNative Cloud enables teams to run legacy Kakfa applications while taking advantage of the superior infrastructure and messaging technology that Pulsar offers.

Improved Cluster Usage Visibility

Teams can now visually monitor cluster usage on the console so that they can have more visibility into usage for managing costs and to scale up cluster resources as needed.

View real-time and historical usage data on the new Cluster Usage page. Cluster usage dimensions (Compute Units, Storage Units, Throughput, and Storage Size) are displayed in graphical format with an option to export the data to a csv file.

View usage by instance or in aggregate across an organization and update the date range to view a specific time period.

Pulsar 3.0 available to test on StreamNative Cloud

Pulsar 3.0, the next evolution of Pulsar, is now available for testing on StreamNative Cloud! Pulsar 3.0 allows teams to run even bigger workloads, and is easier for developers to work with locally. Updates include LTS support, an improved load balancer, several performance improvements, and Docker images for M1/M2 Macs.

StreamNative Cloud Customers can try Pulsar 3.0 on a new cluster or reach out to support about upgrading existing clusters. Learn more about Pulsar 3.0 here.

Producer and Consumer events added to StreamNative Audit Log

We’ve enhanced the amount of information available in the audit log to include Pulsar producer and consumer events.  Audit log options can be configured on the cluster settings page on the StreamNative Console.

StreamNative Cloud is a fully managed Pulsar service that allows teams to leverage the  power of Apache Pulsar for their streaming and messaging workloads, without having to deal with the complexity of managing it themselves.

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