REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – October 12, 2020 – Instaclustr, delivering reliability at scale through fully managed open source data technologies, today announced Managed Mirroring as a new capability included in its managed Kafka Connect service. Dedicated Apache ZooKeeper nodes are also now available as part of Instaclustr’s managed Apache Kafka offering. Together, the two additions further strengthen Instaclustr’s delivery of 100% open source Apache Kafka, the leading streaming and queuing technology for large-scale, always-on applications.

In keeping with Instaclustr’s commitment to 100% open source technologies, both the Managed Mirroring and ZooKeeper solutions are provided in their fully open source versions. This commitment enables customers to utilize Instaclustr’s managed solutions knowing they are free from the vendor and technical lock-in that comes with commercialized “open core” alternatives.

“We’re proud to offer a fast and expertly-managed path for enterprises to harness the wide-ranging advantages of open source Apache Kafka and Kafka Connect,” said Ben Slater, Chief Product Officer, Instaclustr. “Our newly introduced Managed Mirroring and dedicated ZooKeeper nodes add to the breadth of options at our customers’ command when it comes to ensuring the reliability and versatility of their managed Kafka deployments.”

Instaclustr’s launch of Managed Mirroring utilizes Kafka Connect’s MirrorMaker functionality. With Managed Mirroring, Instaclustr customers can easily synchronize Kafka data from one cluster to another. High-value use cases include mirroring data between geographical regions for local production/consumption, creating highly available active/active clusters, data backup, and creating a failover cluster. The new service provides customers with a dedicated console page that streamlines mirroring setup and configuration, and enables access to detailed monitoring. Instaclustr’s Technical Operations team provides continuous monitoring and alerting, and takes full end-to-end responsibility for the availability of the mirroring service.

Apache ZooKeeper enables Kafka nodes to be more efficiently managed and coordinated. By now offering dedicated ZooKeeper nodes, Instaclustr provides customers with an advantageous option for applications requiring particularly high performance and reliability. Utilizing dedicated ZooKeeper nodes vastly improves reliability during failure scenarios through added redundancy, thanks to the reduced likelihood of Kafka brokers and ZooKeeper failing simultaneously. Dedicated ZooKeeper nodes also make it possible to scale ZooKeeper nodes independently of Kafka, further decreasing any possibility of I/O conflicts between ZooKeeper and Kafka processes.

Instaclustr’s managed solution offers customers options for leveraging dedicated ZooKeeper nodes in developer and production-ready node sizes, and supports provisioning via the Instaclustr Console, Provisioning API, or the Instaclustr Terraform provider. As part of Instaclustr’s continuous monitoring and alerting, customers can access monitoring metrics specific to ZooKeeper nodes. With the introduction of this new service, Instaclustr also improves on its industry-leading SLAs: customers that deploy dedicated ZooKeeper nodes receive an Enterprise-tier SLA enhanced from a 99.99% to a 99.999% availability guarantee.

“Dedicated ZooKeeper nodes equip our customers using Apache Kafka with an architecture that proves exceptionally resilient in the face of node failures,” said Joe Clay, Instaclustr Technical Operations. “This even more robust architecture reduces recovery time as well as the risk of edge case issues with cluster state inconsistencies. Dedicated ZooKeeper nodes also eliminate contention for resources such as I/O, allowing ZooKeeper to remain performant and reduce bottlenecks and latency – even as load on Kafka increases.”

Customers interested in Instaclustr’s new dedicated ZooKeeper nodes, Managed Mirroring, or in receiving a free trial of Instaclustr-managed Kafka or Kafka Connect can contact Instaclustr here. 

About Instaclustr

Instaclustr delivers reliability at scale through our integrated data platform of open source technologies such as Apache Cassandra®, Apache Kafka®, Apache Spark™, Redis™ and Elasticsearch. We enable companies to focus internal development and operational resources on building cutting edge customer-facing applications. Instaclustr now has more than 70 million node hours and 7 PB of data under management across its open source technology suite.

For more information, visit Instaclustr.com and follow us @Instaclustr.