Overview
Zilla Plus is a Kafka-native edge and service gateway. It is a flexible, secure, and reliable way to create stateless API entry points into your Apache Kafka cluster for both native and non-native Kafka clients, eliminating the need for Kafka Connectors, integration pipelines, custom code, and VPNs.
Use Zilla Plus to securely expose your Kafka cluster to external partners, decouple clients and brokers for disaster recovery, stream data to web/mobile apps for real-time experiences, turn Kafka into an IoT broker, and more!
[SECURE KAFKA GATEWAY] Enable authorized clients to access your Kafka cluster via a custom domain name over the internet with no changes to underlying brokers. Supports IAM, SASL, and mTLS authentication via integrations with AWS Certificate Manager or your third-party certificate authority of choice.
Multiple Zilla Plus instances require only a single NLB, even if there are multiple brokers. The presence of an NLB ensures that publicly reachable Zilla Plus endpoints to Kafka can be DDoS-protected via AWS Shield.
[VIRTUAL CLUSTERS] Logically segment a single Kafka cluster to enable multiple independent client groups to operate in isolation. You can define multiple virtual clusters over the same physical Kafka system, allowing different teams or applications to have isolated environments.
[DISASTER RECOVERY] Deploy Amazon Kafka custom DNS name via Zilla Plus in both primary and secondary AWS regions to support seamless disaster recovery via DNS record update to the secondary AWS region without needing to reconfigure Kafka clients due to a consistent bootstrap server name.
[WEB STREAMING] Expose Kafka topics via SSE (Server-Sent Events) endpoints and stream messages (with "fanout") to web and mobile clients at scale with reliability and security. Create OpenAPI-compliant REST endpoints that allow clients to POST and PUT updates to Kafka topics.
[IOT INGEST & CONTROL] Turn Kafka into a fully-fledged IoT broker, enabling MQTT clients to directly publish and subscribe to topics. Both MQTT messages and client state are stored in Kafka, removing the need for a separate dedicated MQTT broker.
[GRPC-KAFKA EVENT MESH] Turn Kafka into a gRPC server and route service method requests and responses to and from topics. Fan out messages from a Kafka topic to multiple gRPC clients or proxy messages between a gRPC client and server through Kafka, allowing them to communicate as if they are talking directly to each other.
Highlights
- [Security & Governance]: Enable authorized clients to access your Kafka cluster via a custom domain name over the internet with no changes to underlying brokers. Supports IAM, SASL, and mTLS authentication. Integrates with AWS Certificate Manager or any third-party Certificate Authority.
- [Protocol Translation]: Seamlessly connect both native and non-native Kafka clients to your Kafka cluster. Expose topics via declaratively defined REST, SSE, gRPC, and MQTT APIs. Configure APIs via existing OpenAPI and AsyncAPI specs.
- [Performance]: Zilla proxies are stateless and scale out linearly. When multiple Zilla instances are deployed, only a single NLB is required, even if multiple brokers are present. Industry-leading throughput and P99.9 latency benchmarks.