AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)

Amazon MSK provides a fully managed, highly available, secure, and
compatible service for Apache Kafka

Vonage, Secureworks, Poshmark, Nutmeg, and Compass are among
customers and partners using Amazon MSK

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Today, Amazon Web Services Inc., an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN),
announced the general availability of Amazon MSK, a fully managed
service for Apache Kafka that makes it easy for developers to build and
run highly available, secure, and scalable applications based on Apache
Kafka without having to worry about managing the underlying
infrastructure. Amazon MSK is fully compatible with Apache Kafka,
enabling customers to easily migrate their on-premises or Amazon Elastic
Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) clusters to Amazon MSK with no code changes.
There are no commitments or upfront investment required to run Amazon
MSK, and customers only pay for the capacity they use. To get started
with Amazon MSK visit https://aws.amazon.com/msk.

Customers use Apache Kafka to capture and analyze real-time data streams
from a range of sources, including IoT devices, website clickstreams,
financial systems, and database logs. While many customers chose to
self-manage their Apache Kafka clusters, they often spend a lot of time
and expense securing, scaling, patching, and ensuring high availability
for Apache Kafka and Apache ZooKeeper clusters, which Apache Kafka
depends on for resource management. Amazon MSK gives customers all of
the attributes of Apache Kafka combined with the availability, security,
and scalability of AWS. With just a few clicks, customers can create
Apache Kafka clusters designed for high availability that span multiple
Availability Zones (AZs). Amazon MSK continuously monitors underlying
server health, automatically replacing servers when they fail and
patching servers in need of updates. Amazon MSK also runs highly
available Apache ZooKeeper nodes at no additional cost. Amazon MSK
provides multiple levels of security for Apache Kafka clusters,
including VPC network isolation, AWS Identity and Access Management
(IAM) for AWS Application Programming Interface (API) authorization,
encryption at rest, encryption in-transit, TLS based certificate
authentication, and authorization using Apache Kafka access control
lists (ACLs). Customers can easily scale out cluster storage with a few
clicks in the AWS management console to meet changes in demand. Amazon
MSK is fully compatible with Apache Kafka, allowing customers to
continue to run applications built on Apache Kafka, use Apache Kafka
compatible tools and frameworks, and take advantage of new Apache Kafka
innovations, without having to change their code.

“Customers who are running Apache Kafka have told us they want to spend
less time managing infrastructure and more time building applications
based on real-time streaming data,” said Rajesh Sheth, General Manager
of Amazon MSK, AWS. “Amazon MSK gives these customers the ability to run
Apache Kafka without having to worry about managing the underlying
hardware, and it gives them an easy way to integrate their Apache Kafka
applications with other AWS services. With Amazon MSK, customers can
stand up Apache Kafka clusters in minutes instead of weeks, so they can
spend more time focusing on the applications that impact their
businesses.”

Customers start by creating a cluster in Amazon MSK today using the AWS
Console or the AWS CLI, and Apache Kafka clients can connect to a
cluster using Apache Kafka’s open-source APIs. Amazon MSK is available
in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU
(Ireland), EU (London), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Paris), Asia Pacific
(Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Sydney), and will
expand to additional AWS Regions in the coming year.

Vonage is a global business cloud communications leader providing
integrated communications solutions that improve how business gets done
by enhancing a company’s customer and employee experience. Vonage uses
Apache Kafka for real-time communication between various micro-services.
“By using Amazon MSK, we reduced our maintenance overhead and built a
micro-services-based platform that enables businesses to collaborate
more productively and engage their customers more effectively,” said
Venkatesh Ennala, a software engineer with Vonage. “We can now set up
new Kafka clusters more quickly and scale these clusters as our demands
increase. Amazon MSK has removed the complexity of set up and
maintenance, allowing us to focus on what’s most important – building
innovative new capabilities for our customers.”

Secureworks (NASDAQ: SCWX) is a technology-driven cybersecurity leader
that protects organizations in the digitally connected world. “When
developing and launching our security analytics application, Secureworks
chose Amazon MSK service to accelerate time to market and reduce
infrastructure and management overhead,” said Wendy Thomas, Senior Vice
President of Business and Product Strategy at Secureworks. “This allowed
us to focus on innovation and our unique differentiators, helping
protect our customers from cyber threats.”

Poshmark is a leading social commerce platform for the next generation
of retailers and shoppers. “Through technology, our mission is to build
the world’s most connected shopping experience, while empowering people
to build thriving retail businesses. Amazon MSK has made it easy to
setup, maintain and scale Kafka clusters, enabling an end-to-end data
ingestion pipeline supported by a fully-managed service,” said Mahesh
Pasupuleti, Senior Director of Data Engineering at Poshmark. “As our
demands increase, we feel confident that we will be able to scale at
ease and expand our streaming ingestion pipelines for data enrichment
and real-time machine learning, providing an enhanced experience for our
customers.”

Nutmeg is Europe’s largest digital wealth manager, helping consumers to
grow their wealth and reach their financial goals by using cost
effective technology to boost returns. Nutmeg uses Apache Kafka to
underpin their journey towards an event driven architecture. “Since
adopting Amazon MSK, we’ve been able to significantly increase the
efficiency of our teams and reduce time spent maintaining our cluster,”
said Matt Gatrell, CTO of Nutmeg. “As our data requirements and use
cases grew, we started to experience considerable overhead and
complexity in managing our Kafka clusters. Amazon MSK has allowed us to
manage our clusters with confidence, spend less time verifying the
performance of the clusters, scale with ease, and focus more time on
innovating and building exciting real-time applications.”

Compass is a real estate technology company with a powerful end-to-end
platform that supports the entire buying and selling workflow. Compass
uses Apache Kafka to provide its agents with quick access to fresh and
accurate data from hundreds of real estate data sources nationwide.
“Streaming technology is an important part of what we do as a business,
but managing streaming technology involves a lot of heavy lifting by our
software developers,” said Joseph Sirosh, CTO of Compass. “Amazon MSK
has allowed us to eliminate a lot of this heavy lifting. By using Amazon
MSK we no longer need to spend effort on ensuring data durability,
cluster availability, and scalability, and can now focus on building
applications. Amazon MSK relieves our team from the burden of operating
and maintaining Kafka and at the same time, we experience less downtime
as our clusters are fully-managed.”

About Amazon Web Services

For 13 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most
comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 165
fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking,
analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI),
Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and
augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development,
deployment, and management from 66 Availability Zones (AZs) within 21
geographic regions, spanning the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China,
France, Germany, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, India,
Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Sweden, and the UK. Millions of
customer—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises,
and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure,
become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

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