Overview
Exoscale Managed Kafka delivers fully managed Kafka clusters so you can stream data in real time without operating brokers yourself. Provision a cluster in minutes, scale as traffic grows, and let Exoscale handle patching, monitoring & backup.
Terminology
- Service
- a managed Kafka deployment (one or more brokers)
- Broker
- a single Kafka server that stores topic partitions and serves client requests
- Topic
- a named stream of records split into partitions
- Partition
- an ordered, replicated log segment of a topic
- Plan
- resource & redundancy tier such as
startup-2,business-9x-16 - ACL
- rule that authorises a principal on a topic, group or cluster resource
- Schema Registry / Kafka Connect / REST
- optional components you can enable per service
Features
- Managed lifecycle
- automated provisioning, rolling upgrades and in-place re-sizing
- High availability
- multi-broker clusters, automatic leader election, 99.99 % SLA on Business & Premium plans
- Strong security
- mTLS certificate authentication by default; optional SASL/PLAIN for testing
- Observability built-in
- metrics shipped to Exoscale Monitoring dashboards, logs streamable to Object Storage
- Add-ons on demand
- toggle Kafka Connect, REST Proxy or Schema Registry with a single CLI flag
- API-first control
- full feature set exposed via
exo dbaas; Portal surfaces common day-to-day tasks
Availability
Managed Kafka is offered in every Exoscale zone:
| Zone | Country | City | Availability |
|---|---|---|---|
at-vie-1 | Austria | Vienna | |
at-vie-2 | Austria | Vienna | |
bg-sof-1 | Bulgaria | Sofia | |
ch-dk-2 | Switzerland | Zurich | |
ch-gva-2 | Switzerland | Geneva | |
de-fra-1 | Germany | Frankfurt | |
de-muc-1 | Germany | Munich | |
hr-zag-1 | Croatia | Zagreb |
Limitations
- Portal Feature Gap
- advanced ACLs and component toggles are CLI / API only
- Single-Zone Clusters
- brokers run in one zone; cross-zone replication must be configured externally
- No Custom Broker Plug-Ins
- installing third-party JARs on the service is not supported
- Topic bBckups
- automatic snapshot export is not available; rely on replication and downstream consumers
- SASL Security
- provided for testing but less secure than certificate authentication
NOTE For operational procedures (backups, upgrades, maintenance windows, …) see the section Operation. Hands-on guides (migrations, client libraries, Terraform modules, …) you can find under How-To.
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