# Overview

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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