Kafka Playground: Two Free Clusters Without the Operational Hassles

We are proud to announce the launch of our Playground, giving Conduktor Cloud users access to two free Apache Kafka clusters for experimentation. For users just starting out on their Kafka journey, the Personal Playground provides access to Conduktor and a free Kafka cluster to get familiar with both the power of Kafka and Conduktor. All without having to worry about spinning up your own Kafka clusters or using a Command line interface (CLI). For seasoned Kafka users looking to see how Conduktor can help them in their Kafka journey, the Organizational Playground provides a Kafka cluster that’s shared among teammates and enables Engineering teams to collaborate within Conduktor.

Personal Playground: Your own sandbox for learning Kafka

If you want to learn how Kafka works today, you can either host open-source Apache Kafka or use managed Kafka services. The first option adds an administrative burden and the second has cost implications even in the learning phase. The Personal Playground is a free managed Kafka cluster where you can experiment and learn how to create Kafka topics, consume messages, produce data, and monitor consumer groups all within the Conduktor UI.

Interacting with Apache Kafka requires using the CLI. This can be a daunting process with a significant learning curve. The Conduktor Console makes working with Kafka an intuitive and interactive experience.

Organizational Playground: Collaborate with your teammates

The Organizational Playground gives you a Kafka cluster that’s shared among teammates. If you’re a company thinking about using Conduktor, the Organizational Playground lets you test Conduktor while collaborating with your team - all without the hassle of setting up Kafka clusters yourself.

When you’re using Kafka at scale, your worries change from how to use Kafka to how to govern Kafka. Conduktor was made to help teams experience the power of Kafka without operational and organizational pains.

Getting Started

To get your two free Kafka clusters, you can sign up for a 30-day Conduktor Cloud free trial here. When you sign up for a free trial you get access to all Conduktor features - including features only available in Conduktor Enterprise like Data Masking, and Topic-as-a-Service.

To integrate Playground with your existing applications, navigate to the Admin page and copy the connection details for your Playground connection into your application configuration.

Conduktor

Conduktor's Playground is a big leap forward in proliferating the use of Kafka for developers and enterprises transitioning to the cloud. It is a big step towards realizing our vision at Conduktor — Kafka should be accessible to all and any friction for developers should be minimized.