Confluent Platform installation

The third way to install Kafka is through Confluent Platform. In the rest of this book, we will be using Confluent Platform open source version.

Confluent Platform is an integrated platform that includes the following components:

• Apache Kafka
• REST proxy
• Kafka Connect API
• Schema Registry
• Kafka Streams API
• Pre-built connectors
• Non-Java clients
• KSQL

If the reader notices, almost every one of the components has its own chapter in this book.

The commercially licensed Confluent Platform includes, in addition to all of the components of the open source version, the following:

• Confluent Control Center (CCC)
• Kafka operator (for Kubernetes)
• JMS client
• Replicator
• MQTT proxy
• Auto data balancer
• Security features

It is important to mention that the training on the components of the non-open source version is beyond the scope of this book.

Confluent Platform is available also in Docker images, but here we are going to install it in local.

Open Confluent Platform download page: https://www.confluent.io/download/ .

At the time of this writing, the current version of Confluent Platform is 5.0.0 as a stable release. Remember that, since the Kafka core runs on Scala, there are two versions: for Scala 2.11 and Scala 2.12.

We could run Confluent Platform from our desktop directory, but following this book's conventions, let's use /opt/ for Linux users and /usr/local for macOS users.

To install Confluent Platform, extract the downloaded file, confluent-5.0.0-2.11.tar.gz, in the directory, as follows:

> tar xzf confluent-5.0.0-2.11.tar.gz