As Kafka evolves in your business, adopting best practices becomes a must. The GitOps methodology makes sure deployments match intended outcomes, anchored by a single source of truth. When integrating Apache Kafka with GitOps, many will think of Strimzi. Strimzi uses the Operator pattern for synchronization. This approach, whilst effective, primarily caters to Kubernetes-based Kafka resources (e.g. Topics). But this isn’t ideal.

Confluent has published official Docker containers for many years. They are the basis for deploying a cluster in Kubernetes using Confluent for Kubernetes (CFK), and one of the underpinning technologies behind Confluent Cloud. For testing, containers are convenient for quickly spinning up a local cluster with all the components required, such as Confluent Schema Registry or Confluent Control Center.