Apache Kafka with Control and Data Planes

Mission-critical Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform deployments can improve efficiency and isolation by separating the data plane, which handles business events, from a control plane that manages monitoring, security, governance, and administration. Internal services such as Control Center, Confluent Metrics Reporter, and Confluent Metadata Service can consume broker storage, CPU, memory, bandwidth, and network capacity through metrics, authorization, metadata, and internal topics, although broker-required internal traffic cannot be entirely removed. The proposed architecture moves monitoring metrics to a remote control-plane cluster and centralizes authorization, authentication, audit logging, and cluster management there, allowing one control-plane cluster to support multiple data-plane clusters. Configuration examples demonstrate connecting data-plane brokers and Control Center to remote services using bootstrap servers, SASL authentication, and JWT-based access. Confluent Cloud implements this separation by design, hosting operational services such as security, monitoring, Schema Registry, Kafka Streams, and ksqlDB separately so Kafka clusters can focus on processing business data.

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