Making Kafka Serverless: Lessons From Confluent Cloud

What this post added

This post introduces the architectural components and design considerations for making Kafka serverless in Confluent Cloud. It details the roles of the control plane, Confluent Kubernetes Operator, Self-Balancing Clusters, and Infinite Storage. The control plane manages resource provisioning and scaling by translating customer requests into Kubernetes custom resources (Physical Stateful Clusters). Self-Balancing Clusters automate elastic expansion/contraction and storage balancing. Infinite Storage leverages tiered storage with object storage for elasticity and cost reduction. The communication between control and data planes uses an event-driven architecture with Kafka and Debezium connectors.