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:

ZoneCountryCityAvailability
at-vie-1AustriaVienna
at-vie-2AustriaVienna
ch-gva-2SwitzerlandGeneva
ch-dk-2SwitzerlandZurich
de-fra-1GermanyFrankfurt
de-muc-1GermanyMunich
bg-sof-1BulgariaSofia

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.