Announcing Calisti v1.11: Deep Visualization and Management for Event-Driven Applications

It’s a familiar (and ironic) phenomenon in the evolving world of cloud-native architecture: the tools you adopt to help you manage complexity keep adding their own layers of convolution to the Rubik’s cube of your environment.

For example, the convenience and flexibility of microservices propelled enthusiastic adoption…and introduced a new layer of management complexity in the process. Kubernetes emerged as the de-facto orchestrator, followed by service mesh, which added observability, security, and reliability at the platform layer and eased scale. These technologies, too, brought their own sets of challenges (lifecycle management, multi-cluster support, and supporting advanced use cases, such as circuit breakers and canary deployments among them).

The latest addition to this stack is Apache Kafka running on Kubernetes. This open-source distributed event-streaming platform offers high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, and data integration for mission-critical apps, and—you guessed it—even more complexity.

So how can you reap the benefits of Kafka on Kubernetes without hiring a cadre of new developers? With Calisti v1.11—the industry’s first and only platform providing communications security, deep visualization, and easy management for microservices and event-driven applications.

Run Apache Kafka the cloud-native way, with Calisti v1.11

Calisti v1.11 still installs and upgrades Istio for you, but has added a host of new features, including:

• The zero-touch and end-to-end encryption of Kafka microservices
• Health metrics for both event and non-event driven services and workloads
• Reliability testing, fault injection, and configuration validations, which simplify connectivity, security, and observability for microservices-based applications

Calisti v 1.11 lets you integrate Istio between Kafka components inside the cluster and two external clients. It bolsters security and provides authentication/authorization, observability, and traffic management. It also gives you network-level tracing between Kafka components to ease debugging and powers declarative Kafka access-control list (ACL) implementation to improve performance.

The new release also provides:

• Flexibility, portability, and consistency across on-premises datacenters and cloud environments
• Microservices scaling for both single and multi-cluster environments
• Standardized daily operational routines to increase efficiency
• Live and historical views
• Configuration of service-level objectives (SLOs), burn rate, error budget, and compliance monitoring
• Management of microservices running both in containers and on virtual machines (VMs), allowing a phased application migration from VMs to containers
• A simple, declarative approach to deploying and operating production-ready Kafka clusters on Kubernetes—in minutes
• Observability and total control of your Kafka implementation through an advanced web user interface
• Configuration validation and root-cause diagnostics
• Tap view with tracing hooks

Next up on the roadmap, we’ll be building upon the WebAssembly (WASM) Envoy filter to elevate your Kafka cluster to the next level. (Envoy is a sidecar and edge proxy configurable through APIs.)

The best thing about Calisti v1.11? It halts the mounting complexity plaguing today’s cloud-native services and applications. The second-best thing is that you can use it free (forever!) for up to 10 nodes and two clusters—no credit card required. Sign up for the free tier or contact us for a customized demo.

Related: Why You Should Get Excited About Running Kafka on Kubernetes