Are you thinking about securing your business events with a gateway solution that provides secure integration for modern, event architectures, including cloud native? In today’s world, digital businesses need to extend their event architectures by securely bridging diverse protocols. Traditionally, custom proxy servers have been used to solve such problems, however, such solutions are difficult to implement and manage. Modern enterprises require a configuration-based solution with minimal or no code experience which allows them to focus on their core business application development. Organizations need a secure gateway for their legacy applications and REST APIs to build a unified, high-throughput, and low latency platform for handling real-time data feeds. Further, they look for a seamless and secure gateway solution that avoids complex product integrations by reducing the infrastructure complexity and operational costs.
DataPower v10 addresses these needs by integrating with the Apache Kafka open-source stream processing software platform. The DataPower gateway has augmented its core functionality of enhanced message security (with DMZ ready gateway) with support for reading from and writing to Apache Kafka. This powerful integration provides a distributed producer-consumer model giving digital business agility in their implementation and delivery.
DataPower provides a single gateway stack that natively connects between microservices and event-based workloads without any special adapters. It enforces consistent security across microservices and event-based workloads without the need for external security solutions which thereby help to minimize the overall cost of ownership and accelerate the go-to-market strategy.
DataPower can act as a Kafka Producer and an API provider. In this scenario, an application can communicate with DataPower through traditional protocols exposed as DataPower endpoints. The message received through an application gets translated in DataPower using the processing policy before it is written onto the Kafka cluster. Standalone Apache Kafka can only support the native apache protocol, but DataPower gateway provides a powerful mechanism of Protocol transformation such as HTTP(S), IBM MQ, FTP, SFTP, AMQP, and others. It writes messages to Kafka by leveraging the Kafka partitions model to provide high throughput of messages allowing the DataPower-Kafka connection to work with extremely high speeds and reliability.
DataPower can also act as a Kafka Consumer by reading messages from a Kafka topic in real time via a subscription. This allows any business solution to respond as the business events are occurring. DataPower also an optional response topic which can be used to produce a response from DataPower that can be sent to a Kafka topic in another data center. DataPower provides a robust ability to access Kafka support programmatically via GatewayScript (JavaScript) or XSLT. The configuration is done through a Kafka cluster object which is used to configure the details such as how to connect to the Kafka servers without programming.
DataPower also provides a flexibly by allowing use of authentication protocols such as OAuth, SAML, LDAP, and many more to validate access for incoming event workloads.
As shown in the below diagram, DataPower and Kafka integration ensures a secure communication between the data centers by provisioning the organizations to apply the security protocols per their business needs. It secures the traffic across the organizational zones using a flexible set of protocols including SASL, TLS (SSL), SASL TLS (SSL) and Plaintext. DataPower also provides the capabilities to encrypt payloads before sending to Kafka.