Lightstreamer Kafka Connector

Is your product struggling to deliver Kafka events to remote users? The Lightstreamer Kafka Connector bridges the gap, providing seamless, real-time data streaming to web and mobile applications with unmatched ease and reliability.

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What is Kafka last-mile integration?

Kafka, while powerful, isn’t designed for direct internet access—particularly when it comes to the “last mile,” the critical network segment that extends beyond enterprise boundaries and edges (LAN or WAN) to reach end users. Last-mile integration is essential for delivering real-time Kafka data to mobile, web, and desktop applications, addressing challenges that go beyond Kafka’s typical scope, such as:

Disruptions from corporate firewalls and client-side proxies blocking Kafka connections.
Performance issues due to unpredictable internet bandwidth, including packet loss and disconnections.
User interfaces struggling with large data volumes.
The need for scalable solutions capable of supporting millions of concurrent users.

Why choose the Lightstreamer Kafka Connector?

The Lightstreamer Kafka Connector serves as an intelligent proxy, seamlessly bridging Kafka with the internet. Powered by Lightstreamer technology—the world’s leading last-mile data delivery platform—it streams data in real-time to your applications over WebSockets, eliminating the need for polling a REST proxy and surpassing the limitations of MQTT proxies. With features like Intelligent Streaming, the Lightstreamer Kafka Connector effortlessly extends your Kafka topics to web, mobile, and desktop platforms. Fully reliable, with no compromises.

Been a customer for over a decade, and Lightstreamer has been a valuable tool in the tool belt.

Regan Sizer

— Chief Technology Officer, Amherst Pierpont Securities (now Santander)

Extend your Kafka broker with Lightstreamer

Enhance your Kafka-based infrastructure by integrating Lightstreamer, bringing real-time data streaming and advanced client management to your applications.

KAFKA CONNECTOR

Effortlessly integrate Lightstreamer with any third-party Kafka broker, whether it’s a managed cloud service or an on-premises deployment.

Apache Kafka

Confluent Cloud

Amazon MSK

Redpanda

Aiven

Red Hat

Kafka Client

Lightstreamer connects directly to the Kafka broker using the Kafka Client API. This method is lighter and faster, offering optimal performance.

Kafka Connect

Lightstreamer leverages the Kafka Connect framework in this option. While it may be less agile than the Kafka Client API, this approach is advantageous in environments that require standardized integration, or when working with a variety of connectors to stream data between Kafka and external systems.

METADATA ADAPTER

Effortlessly extend the default Lightstreamer Metadata Adapter through the provided SDK to integrate your custom initialization, authentication, and authorization processes.

Authentication

Seamlessly authenticate users using your existing authentication systems.

Authorization

Precisely control user access to specific Kafka topics based on your authorization rules.

Connect your frontend to Kafka

Easily integrate real-time capabilities into your applications with Lightstreamer’s flexible client libraries. Whether you’re developing for mobile, web, desktop, or even smartwatch platforms, Lightstreamer enables smooth and efficient streaming of live data directly from your Kafka broker.

CLIENT API

Our comprehensive and flexible client APIs simplify the process of consuming data from Kafka topics within any type of application. They are designed to support a wide range of platforms, technologies, and programming languages, making it easy to integrate Kafka data into your frontends across diverse environments.

Platforms

Web browsers

Android

Windows

Linux

Apple

Flutter

Unity

Languages

JavaScript

Swift

Kotlin

Java

Python

Node.js

.NET

C++

WebSockets

BLAZING FAST

Connect millions of clients without sacrificing speed. Efficiently fan out real-time messages from Kafka topics, minimizing the load on both Kafka brokers and client applications.

Under the same test conditions, even on a modest server with 4 cores and 8 GiB of RAM, the Lightstreamer Kafka Connector demonstrated the ability to scale to over 100,000 concurrent clients, significantly surpassing the scalability of direct connections to the Kafka broker.

Optimized data broadcasting

When streaming a Kafka topic to a large number of client applications, a typical Kafka broker falls short. Common use cases include broadcasting Kafka data to web and mobile applications, such as:
– Financial Apps: Transmitting stock prices to trading apps, where clients may only need updates on specific stocks, groups of stocks, or market indices.
– Telemetry Applications: Streaming real-time telemetry data to dashboards displaying selected metrics.
– Chat Applications: Delivering chat messages to specific client apps based on the active chat room.

In many cases, only a subset of messages needs to reach each client, driven by application logic rather than Kafka’s standard consumer group distribution. The Lightstreamer Kafka Connector addresses this challenge by allowing selective message delivery based on specific keys or fields, overcoming the limitations of Kafka’s partitioning and the complexity of managing numerous topics.

Massive scalability

The Lightstreamer Broker is engineered to handle massive scalability, featuring a sophisticated staged event-driven architecture combined with asynchronous I/O and dynamic thread pools. This design allows it to scale both vertically and horizontally, effortlessly managing millions of concurrent clients. Despite the heavy load, it maintains consistently low message latency, ensuring real-time data delivery without compromising performance.

Load testing tool

An open-source load and stress testing tool is available to benchmark Kafka brokers with and without the Lightstreamer Kafka Connector in data broadcasting scenarios. This tool includes a data producer and a client simulator capable of generating a very large number of clients, while accurately measuring end-to-end latency and throughput.
Explore on GitHub

Advanced features for seamless Kafka integration

All the powerful features of Lightstreamer, plus:

No more REST polling

Say goodbye to resource-intensive REST polling. The Lightstreamer Kafka Connector enables asynchronous, real-time data streaming to your mobile and web apps, eliminating the need for continuous polling of a REST proxy. This approach significantly reduces resource consumption on both the client and server sides, delivering a more efficient and responsive experience.

No need for MQTT

While MQTT is occasionally used as a lightweight proxy for Kafka, it was originally designed for IoT and isn’t well-suited for browser environments or handling proxies. Moreover, MQTT lacks essential network optimization techniques such as adaptive throttling, bandwidth management, data resampling, conflation, and intelligent streaming, making it less efficient for modern web and mobile applications.

Firewall & proxy traversal

Lightstreamer’s StreamSense algorithm automatically selects the optimal transport protocol for each client, ensuring seamless data delivery even through the most restrictive corporate firewalls and legacy proxies. This guarantees that live data reaches your users, no matter where they are, by effectively navigating through network obstacles.

Intelligent Streaming

Lightstreamer dynamically adjusts the data flow to match each user’s network conditions, ensuring all users stay in sync regardless of connection quality. By resampling and conflating data on the fly, it delivers real-time updates with adaptive throttling, effectively handling packet loss without buffering delays. It also manages disconnections and reconnections seamlessly, keeping your users connected and up-to-date.

Server-side filtering

Optimize data delivery by sending only the relevant information to each client application. Lightstreamer filters Kafka messages on the server side based on any criteria, such as record keys, values, topics, partitions, and more. This targeted filtering drastically reduces the load on client devices, minimizing bandwidth usage and enhancing application performance, especially in environments with high data volumes.

Powerful topic mapping

Leverage the Lightstreamer Kafka Connector’s Data Extraction Language, a simple yet powerful tool for extracting data from Kafka records. This flexible language allows you to precisely map Kafka data to Lightstreamer’s items and fields, ensuring efficient and accurate delivery to end clients.

Record evaluation

The Lightstreamer Kafka Connector can deserialize Kafka records from various formats, including Avro, JSON, and scalar types, with built-in message validation. It also supports independent deserialization of keys and values, allowing them to be processed in different formats, offering flexibility and precision in handling your data streams.

Schema Registry support

The Lightstreamer Kafka Connector integrates with the Confluent Schema Registry, enabling seamless management and validation of schemas that define message structures. This ensures that all data streams comply with the defined formats, enhancing data consistency and reducing errors.

Push notifications

In addition to streaming data directly to client applications, Lightstreamer can deliver Kafka messages through push notifications to mobile devices and web browsers. This ensures that your mobile and web apps receive real-time updates, even when they are not actively running, keeping users informed at all times.

Maximum security

Protect your data with full encryption in transit. The Lightstreamer Kafka Connector uses TLS-secured connections with the Kafka broker, supporting various authentication mechanisms, and ensures secure connections with clients, offering strong authentication and authorization.

Open source

The Lightstreamer Kafka Connector is an open-source project, designed for easy extension and customization. It encourages community contributions, enabling developers to enhance its functionality. Operating on top of the robust Lightstreamer Broker, the Connector ensures reliable data delivery while offering the flexibility of open-source integration.

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Achieve Real-Time Excellence

Lightstreamer: Your ally in business growth

In today’s fast-paced world, real-time data is crucial. Lightstreamer meets this need effortlessly and cost-effectively.

60% reduction in infrastructure costs

Lightstreamer’s efficient data streaming technology can significantly reduce the need for extensive hardware and network resources, leading to lower operational expenses.

50% reduction in disconnection incidents

Lightstreamer’s robust handling of network issues, such as reconnections and disconnections, ensures more stable and reliable connections, reducing downtime and enhancing user experience.

25% increase in user conversions

Real-time data delivery can enhance user engagement and interaction, leading to higher conversion rates as users are more likely to complete desired actions on the platform.

20% reduction in churn rate

By providing a seamless and reliable real-time experience, Lightstreamer can improve user satisfaction and retention, reducing the rate at which users leave the platform.

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