Solace Beta Opportunity: Join the Solace Community Kafka Crush!

rtomkins

Calling all Solace Community members!

Solace's Integrated Kafka Bridge is designed to simplify the deployment and amplify the benefits of a Kafka Mesh and to enable message translation between Solace and Kafka brokers!

This feature is in great shape with just a couple of bugs and some work to be done around resource profiling and performance tuning! However, it's been confined to the "Solitude" of our labs for too long!

Solace knows the Kafka world is full of different ecosystems from the wild and untamed to the precisely orchestrated with a wide variety of different implementations, authentication, authorization, and compression technologies, and Kafka attributes. So, we've put Integrated Kafka Bridge as a Beta feature in the new 10.4.1 LTS PubSub+ Broker Release!

We want to you take this feature into your Kafka environment and crush it! Put it through its paces! Let us know what works and what doesn't! Test Integrated Kafka Bridge in your environment and ensure the GA release meets your needs!

See the beta release notes/limitations below!

Keep Crushing It,

Rob Tomkins

Senior Principal Core Product Manager, Solace

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Integrated Kafka Bridge Beta Release Notes for PubSub+ Broker 10.4.1 LTS Release

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This feature connects to Kafka brokers and converts Solace messages that are placed in one or more queues into Kafka and publishes them to the Kafka broker in a manner similar to a standard Kafka producer. It also consumes Kafka messages and publishes them to the Solace broker, allowing events from Kafka to be on-ramped into Solace. This provides the ability to feed events to Kafka for processing by Kafka clients, as well as streaming processors without the need to implement infrastructures like Kafka Connect with specialized connectors.

This feature applies only to PubSub+ Software Brokers. It does not work on Solace Appliances.

BETA Limitations:

- Not supported in production

- Supported for 1 year or until the next Long Term Support (LTS) release of the software broker, whichever is later

- Not be supported on PubSub+ Cloud unless a future announcement is made to the contrary

- Only the default Kafka batch settings are supported (but let us know if you try different settings for your environment and they don't work!)

- Kerberos authentication is not supported

- 100 and 1K endpoint software brokers require an additional 4GB of RAM and are limited to a total of 20 senders or receivers and 320 Total Connected Kafka Brokers*

- 10K+ endpoint software brokers require an additional 10GB of RAM and are limited to a total of 100 senders and 100 receivers and 800 Total Connected Kafka Brokers*

- Performance may degrade when this feature is active

- Fixes to this feature will be limited to future Beta/EA/GA releases and not applied to 10.4.1.X

- When upgrading from 10.4.1 to a future release, the configuration of this feature may be removed

Known Bugs:

- Do not use Kafka regex expressions with wild cards (several bugs)

Note that this Beta deviates from the public Solace definition of beta in that the Solace Support team will provide support (subject to the limitations above) in non-production environments.

We recommend this feature to those familiar with Kafka and who have reviewed the material about this feature at docs.solace.com as a vehicle to translate between Solace and Kafka or to build a Kafka Mesh.

* - Total Connected Kafka Brokers = Sum of all Brokers in a Cluster connected to each and every Kafka Reciever and Sender. For example, if you have broker with a sender and receiver connected to the same cluster with 16 Kafka brokers in that cluster and a different sender connected to a different cluster of 40 Kafka brokers, your Total Kafka Connected Brokers = 16 + 16 + 40 = 72.

rtomkins

Pleased to announce that with the release of 10.6.1, the Integrated Kafka Bridge is officially GA just in time for the holidays!

A big thank you to everyone who participated in our Beta and Early Access programs! You are a big part of making this a success!

Keep Streaming,

Rob Tomkins

Principal Platform Product Manager, Solace