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Streaming Audio: A Confluent podcast about Apache Kafka®

Automating DevOps for Apache Kafka and Confluent ft. Pere Urbón-Bayes

Autonomy is key in building a sustainable and motivated team, and this core principle also applies to DevOps. Building self-serve Apache Kafka® and Confluent Platform deployments require a streamlined process with unrestricted tools—a centralized processing tool that allows teams in large or mid-sized organizations to automate infrastructure changes while ensuring shared standards are met. With more than 15 years of engineering and technology consulting experience, Pere Urbón-Bayes (Senior Solution Architect, Professional Services, Confluent) built an open source solution—JulieOps—to enable a self-serve Kafka platform as a service with data governance. 

JulieOps is one of the first solutions available to realize self-service for Kafka and Confluent with automation. Development, operations, security teams often face hurdles when deploying Kafka. How can a user request the topics that they need for their applications? How can the operations team ensure compliance and role-based access controls? How can schemas be standardized and structured across environments? Manual processes can be cumbersome with long cycle times. Automation reduces unnecessary interactions and shortens processing time, enabling teams to be more agile and autonomous in solving problems from a localized team level. 

Similar to Terraform, JulieOps is declarative. It's a centralized agent that uses the GitOps philosophy, focusing on a developer-centric experience with tools that developers are already familiar with, to provide abstractions to each product personas. All changes are documented and approved within the change management process to streamline deployments with timely and effective audits, as well as ensure security and compliance across environments.  

The implementation of a central software agent, such as JulieOps, helps you automate the management of topics, configuration, access controls, Confluent Schema Registry, and more within Kafka. It’s multi tenant out of the box and supports on-premises clusters and the cloud with CI/CD practices. 

Tim and Pere also discuss the steps necessary to build a self-service Kafka with an automatic Jenkins process that will empower development teams to be autonomous.

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