The Easiest Way to Install Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform – Using Ansible

Confluent Platform 5.3 introduces CP-Ansible, open-source Ansible playbooks designed to simplify the deployment and configuration of Apache Kafka and the Confluent Platform by leveraging Ansible's agentless, YAML-based automation capabilities. CP-Ansible aims to enhance the setup process by applying best practices for infrastructure management and offering customization options through variable overrides in the playbooks. This approach facilitates seamless security protocol deployment and allows for scalability across multiple hosts, ensuring correct configurations for communication between components like brokers, Apache ZooKeeper, and Confluent Schema Registry. The playbooks also support the SASL PLAIN security protocol, simplifying security deployments across clusters. Users can validate their installation via the Confluent Control Center interface, which provides an overview of cluster statuses and statistics. The article encourages community contributions to CP-Ansible and highlights the availability of commercial support from Confluent. The blog also notes the upcoming enhancements to CP-Ansible and introduces new features in Confluent Platform 7.7, including OAuth support and integration with Apache Flink and Amazon OpenSearch.