Automate Kafka Topic Governance with Topic as a Service

Apache Kafka spreads fast across organizations because it handles real-time data well. But widespread Kafka adoption creates security and governance problems. Topic as a Service in the Conduktor Platform solves these.

Dashboard for topic as a service

The Governance Problem: No Standards, No Ownership

When teams start with Kafka, nobody bothers with naming conventions or optimal topic configurations. Speed matters more than consistency. This works fine initially.

Then Kafka scales. Different teams use different naming schemes, different configs, different security models. Combining these becomes a full-time integration job. You spend more time reconciling approaches than building features.

The obvious fix: make Ops handle all topic creation. But Kafka is built on topics. Your Ops team transforms from engineers into request-approval robots. Skilled people doing repetitive work.

What Topic as a Service Does

Topic as a Service acts as your Kafka gatekeeper. It standardizes topic access and creation from the start, letting teams create, share, and control Kafka resources without manual coordination.

Here's how it simplifies ownership: the "Wikipedia" application takes ownership of any topic prefixed with "wikipedia", auto-generating ACLs for each topic. Other applications request access and get it granted, no manual ACL configuration needed.

Upcoming Features

Automated Topic Creation: Applications and Teams define naming schemes and topic configurations. Authorized users create their own topics instantly with application owner approval.

Topic Creation Bound to Identity: All topic creation connects back to individual user identity. You see the flow of requests, who created what, who asked for what, how resources are shared.

Getting Started

Topic as a Service is available to Enterprise subscribers. Two setup steps:

1. Create environments (Prod, Staging, etc.) and assign them to clusters from within Topic as a Service.
2. Create teams that will own each application. Teams can be created during application setup, but you need the Admin panel to assign users to teams.

Summary

Topic as a Service takes tedious manual work and automates it. Your teams stop worrying about procedures and rules. They work on what matters instead.