# The Data Streaming Platform for Kafka Operations

Conduktor is the operational layer for Apache Kafka — the control plane your brokers don't come with, on any distribution you already run. Management, governance, and security for organizations running Kafka seriously.

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## What Is a Data Streaming Platform?

A data streaming platform is the infrastructure and tooling that organizations use to build, operate, and govern real-time data pipelines. Apache Kafka is the most widely adopted streaming backbone. But Kafka itself doesn't provide the operational layer: multi-team access controls, field-level security, governance automation, or the developer experience that modern platform engineering requires.

Conduktor is the operational platform that sits on top of Kafka to provide these capabilities.

- **Conduktor Console** — The management UI and API for your Kafka estate. Topic management, consumer group monitoring, schema registry, connector management, and developer self-service portal, across all clusters.
- **Conduktor Gateway** — A transparent Kafka proxy that enforces field-level encryption, RBAC, data masking, schema validation, and routing policies. Applications connect to Gateway; Gateway enforces your policies.
- **conduktor-ctl CLI** — Command-line interface for Kafka-as-Code. Apply YAML manifests for topics, ACLs, schemas, and policies. Integrate with CI/CD pipelines for automated Kafka governance.

## The Full Kafka Operations Stack

- **Data Ingestion** — Manage Kafka Connect connectors: deploy, monitor, restart from the UI. Works with any connector in the Kafka Connect ecosystem. Self-service deployment with platform team guardrails.
- **Data Visibility** — Browse and inspect messages in any topic. Search by field, filter by time range, deserialize any format. Full topic lifecycle visibility without CLI tools.
- **Data Security** — Field-level encryption, RBAC, mTLS, data masking, and audit logging. Enforced at the Conduktor Gateway layer. Every producer and consumer inherits your security policies automatically.
- **Data Governance** — Naming conventions, retention policies, schema standards, ownership model. Automated enforcement, not wiki documentation that developers ignore.
- **Data Operations** — Consumer lag alerts, broker health monitoring, partition management, offset reset. The operational tools your team needs to run Kafka reliably at scale.
- **Data Sharing** — Secure data sharing between teams and with external partners. Virtual clusters with isolated namespaces and controlled access. Partner zones for external data consumers.

## Data Streaming Platform Comparisons

- **Apache Kafka** — The distributed streaming backbone. Conduktor extends Kafka with management, security, and governance tooling. It's not an alternative to Kafka.
- **Confluent Platform** — Confluent's commercial Kafka distribution with its own management tooling. Conduktor is cloud and distribution-agnostic (Confluent, MSK, self-managed Kafka, Redpanda).
- **AWS MSK** — Amazon's managed Kafka service. Conduktor works as the management and governance layer on top of MSK, adding capabilities MSK doesn't provide natively.
- **Azure Event Hubs** — Kafka-compatible event streaming on Azure. Conduktor connects to Event Hubs via the Kafka protocol for management and governance.

## Read more customer stories

- [Smart Farming: 10x Kafka Utilization on AWS](https://www.conduktor.io/customer-stories/accelerating-smart-farming-innovation-with-conduktor-and-amazon-msk)
- [FlixBus: Data Mesh for 50+ Teams](https://www.conduktor.io/customer-stories/flix)
- [Swiss Post: 5x Kafka Growth](https://www.conduktor.io/customer-stories/how-swiss-post-governs-democratizes-kafka-usage)

## Frequently Asked Questions

**What makes Conduktor a "data streaming platform" vs. just a Kafka UI?**

A UI is read-only visibility. A data streaming platform is the full operational layer: management, governance, security enforcement, developer self-service, GitOps integration, and programmatic API. Conduktor provides all of these.

**Does Conduktor work with non-Kafka streaming systems?**

Conduktor is purpose-built for Apache Kafka and Kafka-compatible brokers (Confluent, MSK, Redpanda, Aiven). It doesn't currently support non-Kafka systems like Pulsar or Kinesis.

**Can Conduktor replace a cloud provider's Kafka service?**

No. Conduktor runs on top of Kafka, not instead of it. It provides the management and governance layer regardless of which Kafka distribution or cloud service you use.

**How does Conduktor handle multi-cloud Kafka deployments?**

Console connects to Kafka clusters across any cloud provider. Platform teams manage all clusters from one interface. Conduktor Gateway can route traffic between clusters for failover or migration scenarios.

## See the Full Conduktor Platform

Kafka is your data backbone. Conduktor is your operations platform. 30-minute demo covering Console, Conduktor Gateway, and CLI — and how they work together for platform teams at scale.

[Talk to Us](https://www.conduktor.io/contact/demo) [Get Started Free →](https://www.conduktor.io/get-started)