Aiven Blog

Jun 24, 2020

Aiven now offers Apache Kafka MirrorMaker® 2.0 as a service

We now do MirrorMaker! And it's great.

john-hammink

John Hammink

|RSS Feed

Developer Advocate at Aiven

At Aiven, we strive to give our customers reliable, convenient, and responsive data tools. Many customers already enjoy our managed Apache Kafka® solution along with Apache Kafka Connect® as a service. Now, we are happy to announce that we’re providing Apache Kafka MirrorMaker® 2.0 as a managed service.

MirrorMaker 2.0 is the most robust solution for data replication between Apache Kafka clusters. By deploying it as a stand-alone service, you can free your replication workloads from others — this means that you can better allocate cluster resources and scale your processing workloads.

In this post, we’ll discuss

  • the Apache Kafka MirrorMaker 2.0 key features included in our managed service
  • the metrics you can get from your MirrorMaker clusters with our native metrics integration, and
  • what’s in store for the future.

Key features of MirrorMaker 2.0

MirrorMaker has been around for many years and is widely used. The Apache Kafka community has been aware of its downsides and limitations since, as well as the attempts to fix them with other replication tools. With version 2.4, MirrorMaker 2.0 (following KIP-382: MirrorMaker 2.0) was added to Apache Kafka.

Mirrormaker 2.0 is new and improved:

  • Preserved offset mappings between clusters. This means tooling for nearly transparent consumer migration is possible — critical for disaster recovery fail-over.
  • Topic configuration is now synchronized from source to target clusters — removing the need for external tools.
  • Record partitions are now preserved during the replication process.
  • The ability to run multiple replication flows for a single MirrorMaker cluster and the prevention of replication cycles — allowing for complex replication topologies.
  • Increased reliability, scalability and performance by leveraging the Kafka Connect framework.

Aiven support for MirrorMaker 2.0

Aiven supports MirrorMaker 2 with the Console UI, Aiven command line client, and Aiven Terraform provider.

Console Screenshot mirroraker replication flow overview

Note, though, that you need Aiven for Apache Kafka to run Aiven for MirrorMaker2; you can't use it with your self-hosted Apache Kafka setup.

Aiven metrics integration for MirrorMaker 2.0

To get the most out of your Aiven for MirrorMaker 2 cluster, we’re also providing access to a metrics integration with built-in dashboards to monitor a host of metrics related to replication, such as replication lag and replication latency.

Aiven metrics integration with built-in monitoring

The replication flow metrics run by MirrorMaker 2.0 are collected and visualized in Grafana.

Getting started with MirrorMaker 2.0

Go to the Aiven Console, Terraform provider, REST API, or CLI and launch a MirrorMaker cluster. Then tie it to your source and target clusters through an integration workflow.

For more information about the finer points of setting up your first replication workflow, see this help article.

Wrapping up

Aiven for Apache Kafka MirrorMaker 2.0 will allow Aiven users to seamlessly copy data between Apache Kafka clusters faster than ever! To get more information, go to our Aiven for Apache Kafka product page.

--
To get the latest news about Aiven and our services, plus a bit of extra around all things open source, subscribe to our monthly newsletter! Daily news about Aiven are available on our LinkedIn and Twitter feeds.

If you just want to stay find out about our service updates, follow our changelog.

Are you're still looking for a managed data platform? Sign up for a free trial at https://console.aiven.io/signup!
Struggling with the management of your data infrastucture? Sign up now for your free trial at https://console.aiven.io/signup!


Related resources