Console 1.23 brings you the powerful ability to manage topics through infrastructure as code (IaC) whilst enforcing policies to restrict misconfigurations.

We've also made the Consume page more customizable, allowing you to choose the columns you want to display, along with a host of improvements to help you with your Kafka day-to-day.

Let’s dive into what’s new!

Kafka Self-service

Self-service is a critical part of scaling Kafka within your organization, enabling collaboration between the central platform team and application teams.  With the latest release Application Teams can now manage their Topic resource lifecycle through IaC with the addition of the Topic object, and they can do this safely with Platform Teams putting in place a Topic Policy to restrict expensive configurations, enforce naming standards and any other best practices.

The topic policies give the platform teams confidence as they can define several of the governance rules needed to prevent misconfigurations.

There's more to see than just the topic and topic policy, if you want to read more on service account synchronization then see the full list of resource definitions.

Topic Catalog

We've introduced the Topic Catalog, to help teams discover Kafka Topics within your organization. Quickly get visbility on ownership and business metadata on your choice for topics. No more wondering and questioning who owns the topic, what is it for, and any other custom questions regarding metadata!

Once topics are associated to Applications they'll appear within the catalog across all your clusters, searchable by both name and labels.

We're currently working on adding in filters and more 👀

Is there anything else you'd like to see, how would you want the topic catalog to work in your org? Let us know through the public roadmap or drop us an email at product@conduktor.io, we'd love to hear from you.

Quality of Life Improvements

Editable Consume Page

You can now customise the columns you want to display in the Consume Page. Hide or show columns based on what you're interested in. Let us know if there's any additional metadata you want to see!

Topics and Message Viewer

We've added a load of enhancements to the way you navigate topics and inspect messages. The message viewer has been enriched to now show you the schemaId & the header count whilst viewing each message.

You'll also find the more options ... button has been moved so that it's available from every Topic details tab, and the Add partitions button integrated to the Partitions tab. An additional check now exists to prevent producing empty keys to a compacted topic.

Kafka Connect List

The Kafka Connect List can now be sorted by the number of tasks! A frequently requested addition we're delighted to bring to you. We've also improved the journey for removing connectors with some more sensible redirects and added even more configuration keys for the topics column.

Schema Registry Pages

Meanwhile the schema registry experience benefits from a wider side panel and use of the full height when working with schemas, as well as putting the current schema in to read-only.

Conclusion

In summary, we've explored the upgrades from Conduktor's latest release, bringing the powerful ability to manage topics through infrastructure as code (IaC) whilst enforcing policies to restrict expensive configurations as well as a host of improvements on working with your Kafka visually.

Check out our latest changelog for all the details on the 1.23 product release, or if you’re new here, it’s easier than ever to get started with Conduktor, for free.