Open Source Kafka Connect Adds More than a Dozen Connectors

Confluent Adds Certified Connectors, Partners to Kafka Ecosystem

PALO ALTO, Calif.—April 22, 2016—Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache™ Kafka®, today announced growing support within the Kafka and Confluent Partner ecosystem to build and deploy new, Confluent-certified connectors through Kafka Connect. Since Kafka Connect was released in February, Confluent, Kafka core committers, the open source community and ecosystem partners have developed more than a dozen connectors including HDFS, JDBC, Cassandra and S3, with more in development from leading technology companies. Now, Kafka developers can quickly and easily connect various data sources into their stream data platforms.

Kafka Connect is an open source framework for developing the producer (source) and consumer (sink) applications that link external data stores to the Kafka cluster. It simplifies and standardizes connectors at the API level, delivering a Confluent-certified code base that supports the complete Kafka streaming functionality while enabling customizations for expressing the unique features of any data source. Connector developers leveraging the Kafka Connect framework have been able to deliver the same functionality as their earlier offerings with thousands fewer lines of code. First-time developers are able to build Kafka applications that integrate data sources supporting Kafka Connect connectors in a fraction of the time that would previously have been required.

Developers and users looking to integrate streaming data into their business functions should visit the repository of currently available connectors. These offerings illustrate the key advantages of the Kafka Connect framework, including pre-defined delivery semantics, fault tolerance (for both producers and consumers), schema management for the topic streams, and superior deployment/monitoring capabilities.

“Since releasing the Kafka Connect framework just a few months ago, we’ve been actively working with dozens of partners to build the connectors that will help Kafka users get the most from their data systems,” said Jabari Norton, vice president of business development at Confluent. “Kafka adoption is skyrocketing, and Kafka Connect is helping users uncover business insights hidden in their data.”

The Bay Area Apache Kafka community will hold its first Stream Data Hackathon on Monday, April 25, the evening before Kafka Summit, in San Francisco. The event, which is at capacity, will aim to further boost the growing ecosystem of Kafka connectors.
For more information, please visit https://kafka-summit.org/hackathon/.

About Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open source technology that acts as a real-time, fault tolerant, highly scalable messaging system. It is widely adopted for use cases ranging from collecting user activity data, logs, application metrics, stock ticker data and device instrumentation. Its key strength is its ability to make high volume data available as a real-time stream for consumption in systems with very different requirements—from batch systems like Hadoop, to real-time systems that require low-latency access, to stream processing engines that transform the data streams as they arrive. This infrastructure lets you build around a single central nervous system transmitting messages to all the different systems and applications within a company.

About Confluent

Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache™ Kafka®, enables organizations to harness business value from stream data. The Confluent Platform manages the barrage of stream data and makes it available throughout an organization. It provides various industries, from retail, logistics and manufacturing, to financial services and online social networking, a scalable, unified, real-time data pipeline that enables applications ranging from large volume data integration to big data analysis with Hadoop to real-time stream processing. Backed by Benchmark, Data Collective, Index Ventures and LinkedIn, Confluent is based in Palo Alto. To learn more, please visitwww.confluent.io. Download Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform at www.confluent.io/download.

Jill Reed or Alex Cardenas
Highwire PR for Confluent
confluent@highwirepr.com
(415) 963-4174, ext. 5