Kafka Migration & Infrastructure Efficiency Consolidate Clusters. Accelerate Migrations. Cut Costs by 20-40%.
Whether you're migrating to the cloud, consolidating sprawled clusters, or rightsizing infrastructure, Conduktor gives you the visibility and control to act without disruption.
Kafka Sprawl Is the Hidden Tax on Every Data Initiative
What started as a few clusters has grown into a fragmented estate. OSS in one team, MSK in another, Confluent somewhere else. No visibility into what's connected, who owns what, or what it actually costs. Kafka migration and consolidation projects never get off the ground.
Costs Grow Without Accountability
Infrastructure spend climbs year-over-year with no way to tie costs back to business value. No chargeback model means platform teams can't attribute costs to business units, and engineers field constant questions about resource usage with no data to provide answers.
Waste You Can See but Can't Safely Fix
Consolidation could cut costs by 20-40%, but the risk of destabilizing production makes it a non-starter. Team isolation requires dedicated clusters even when utilization is low. Cleaning up idle topics or reducing partitions is impossible without knowing who's consuming what.
Migrations That Stall or Blow Budget
Migration budgets balloon 30-50% as hidden dependencies surface mid-project. Engineering capacity gets consumed by manual topology mapping and cross-team coordination. Critical blockers discovered during cutover force rollbacks and restarts.
Transparent Traffic Routing
Gateway sits between your applications and Kafka, enabling cluster switches and consolidation without application code changes. Seamlessly migrate applications, cluster-by-cluster.
Virtual Clusters
Deploy isolated logical clusters on shared physical infrastructure. Teams get their own namespace and access controls without requiring dedicated hardware. Consolidate from many clusters to few.
Topic Concentration
Multiplex low-volume logical topics onto shared physical topics. Applications see independent topics while the underlying storage is consolidated. Partition counts drop dramatically.
Usage Analytics & Chargeback
Track consumption, storage, and resource usage with cost attribution by team. Identify idle topics, over-provisioned resources, and consolidation opportunities with real data.
Cross-Provider Visibility
Unified view across OSS Kafka, MSK, Confluent, and Aiven. Automatically discover topics, consumer groups, connectors, and schemas across providers. Plan consolidation and migration with complete resource data.
Topic Aliasing
Remap topic names transparently at the Gateway layer. Applications continue using their existing topic names while the underlying infrastructure changes beneath them.
Learn more: Virtual clusters · Topic concentration · Cost control · Gateway overview · Insights
How Migration & Consolidation Works
Four steps from fragmented estate to optimized infrastructure.
Conduktor connects to all your clusters and automatically discovers topics, consumer groups, connectors, and schemas. You get a complete picture of what you're running, who's using it, and what it costs. No more spreadsheets.
Insights surfaces empty, stale, and tiny topics across your clusters. Usage analytics show exactly where waste is and how much consolidation can save.
Gateway routes traffic transparently. Applications point to Gateway, and the underlying cluster can change without code modifications, config updates, or cross-team coordination. The same architecture powers disaster recovery and failover.
Virtual clusters eliminate the need for dedicated infrastructure per team. Topic concentration reduces partition counts by 90%+ for low-volume topics. Chargeback creates accountability across business units.
Track Kafka Infrastructure Costs by Team and Application
Most platform teams can't answer a basic question: which applications are driving your infrastructure costs? Without that data, budget conversations are guesswork and vendor negotiations lack leverage.
- Per-application cost attribution tracking storage and partition usage by application, topic, and virtual cluster
- Automatic metering at the proxy level with no instrumentation required in application code
- Chargeback dashboards showing exactly which teams and services are responsible for resource usage
- Waste detection surfacing empty topics, stale topics, and tiny topics with excessive partitions
- Vendor negotiation leverage with real consumption data instead of estimates
20-40% Infrastructure Cost Reduction
Consolidate clusters, eliminate idle resources, and reduce partition overhead through virtual clusters and topic concentration.
Zero Downtime Cutover
Transparent traffic routing enables cluster migrations and consolidation without service interruption or application changes.
50% Faster Migration Timeline
Automatic resource relationship discovery and Gateway-based routing replace months of manual coordination and cross-team planning.
$500k+ Year 1 Value
Combined savings from infrastructure consolidation, faster migration delivery, and reduced operational overhead.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Conduktor enable migration without application changes?
Applications connect to Conduktor Gateway using standard Kafka clients. Gateway manages the connection to the underlying cluster. When you're ready to migrate, Gateway routes traffic to the new cluster transparently. Your applications don't need new configs, restarts, or code changes. You can migrate gradually and roll back instantly if needed.
What is topic concentration and how does it reduce costs?
Topic concentration multiplexes multiple low-volume logical topics onto a single physical backing topic. Applications still see independent topics with their own names and partitions, but the underlying storage is shared. This can reduce partition counts by 90%+ for sparse topics, directly lowering broker CPU, storage, and replication costs.
Can I consolidate clusters without risking production?
Yes. Virtual clusters provide logical isolation on shared physical infrastructure, so teams maintain their own namespaces and access controls even after consolidation. Gateway handles the traffic routing transparently, and you can migrate workloads incrementally rather than in a single risky cutover.
Does this work across different Kafka providers?
Yes. Conduktor provides a unified control plane across OSS Kafka, Amazon MSK, Confluent Cloud, Aiven, and self-managed deployments. You can migrate between providers or consolidate across them without application awareness.
How do I identify what to consolidate first?
Conduktor Insights analyzes your Kafka estate and surfaces empty, stale, and tiny topics along with usage patterns by team. This gives you a data-driven consolidation plan rather than guesswork, and cost attribution helps you prioritize by business impact.
What about topic naming conflicts during consolidation?
Gateway supports topic aliasing, which lets you remap topic names at the proxy layer. Applications continue using their existing topic names while the physical topics are reorganized underneath. No naming collisions, no code changes.
How does cost attribution work across multiple clusters and providers?
Conduktor connects to all your clusters regardless of provider and tracks consumption at the application level. Gateway meters bytes in and out per service account, topic, and virtual cluster. Console aggregates this into chargeback dashboards so you can see cost breakdowns by team or application across your entire Kafka estate, not just one cluster at a time.
How do I map resources before starting a migration?
Conduktor automatically indexes topics, consumer groups, connectors, and schemas across all connected clusters. Instead of manually building spreadsheets or interviewing application teams, you get a complete resource inventory that shows which consumer groups subscribe to which topics, connector-to-topic relationships, and resource ownership. This is what makes it possible to sequence migrations by complexity and avoid surprises during cutover.
Ready to consolidate your Kafka estate?
See how Conduktor reduces infrastructure costs and accelerates migration. Our team can help you map your current estate and build a consolidation plan that delivers value in weeks, not quarters.