Today, we are pleased to announce that Kafka for Azure HDInsight is in public preview.
What is Apache Kafka for Azure HDInsight?
Kafka for HDInsight is an enterprise-grade, open-source, streaming ingestion service that is cost-effective and easy to provision, manage, and use. Kafka is ideal for real-time scenarios like fraud detection, click stream analysis, financial alerts, telemetry from connected sensors and devices (IoT), social analytics, ‘always on’ ETL pipelines, and network monitoring. Customers can source these real-time events from devices, sensors, infrastructure, applications, websites, and data. Typically, Kafka will be integrated with a scalable stream analytics system like Apache Storm or Apache Spark for HDInsight.
Stream millions of events per second
Process massive amounts of data produced by your real-time applications with Kafka for HDInsight. Apache Kafka is the most popular open source stream-ingestion broker and can handle large numbers of reads and writes per second from thousands of clients. Architect powerful streaming pipelines to drive intelligent real-time actions using out-of-the-box integration with Apache Storm for HDInsight or Apache Spark for HDInsight.
Enterprise-grade management and control
Gain visibility and control over your real-time solution with threat detection, monitoring, and management through Microsoft Operations Management Suite. Capture log, event, and JMX metrics to define pre-emptive actions, and set alerts with Azure Automation runbooks. Plus, get the power to perform statistical aggregations and build rich visualizations for reporting and monitoring.
Easy to set up, fast results
With Kafka for HDInsight, there’s no time-consuming installation or setup—Azure does it for you. Deploy a managed Kafka cluster of your configuration using the full-featured portal or through simple JSON templates. Your cluster will be up and running in minutes, ingesting low-latency, high throughput data. You pay only for the compute and storage you use, with no need to buy new hardware or incur other up-front costs.
How do I get Started?
To get started, customers will need to have an Azure subscription or a free trial to Azure. With this in hand, you should be able to get a Kafka cluster up and running in minutes by going through this getting started guide.