Apache Kafka, the framework used to manage the internal flow of data at companies such as Netflix Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., is getting a usability boost.

The credit goes to a new open-source project from LinkedIn, which originally created Kafka back in 2011. Dubbed Cruise Control, the tool was developed by the social network to automate its internal deployment of the data streaming framework. LinkedIn said the cluster contains more than 1,800 individual Kafka instances, with more to come.  

The features that the Microsoft Corp. subsidiary has included in Cruise Control to ease its internal operations could be handy for other organizations as well. Specifically, the tool streamlines several tasks that together account for much of the administrative work typically involved in maintaining a Kafka cluster.

There are two areas where Cruise Control is particularly useful. The first, according to LinkedIn, is optimizing infrastructure utilization. The tool is capable of automatically enforcing user-defined limits on how much hardware each Kafka instance consumes.

Administrators can use the feature to prevent situations where one instance uses up so many resources that its peers are left unable to operate efficiency. Since companies rely on Kafka to support some of their most important workloads, this capability has the potential to prevent major operational interruptions.

The other major task Cruise Control aims to automate is disaster recovery. When a Kafka instance fails, the tool relaunches the processes that it ran on other nodes in the deployment. In the future, LinkedIn said, the feature could be augmented to automatically replace the failed instance with a new node from a backup pool.

Cruise Control can be managed via a relatively simple programming interface. Administrators specify their high-level operational requirements, and the tool takes care of the rest. An analytics component determines how individual actions should be carried out based on a model of the environment in which Cruise Control runs.

Although it’s designed for Kafka in mind, LinkedIn said the tool is capable of supporting other applications as well. The company sees its capabilities lending themselves particularly well to so-called stateful workloads that store large amounts of data.

LinkedIn has made the source-code for Cruise Control available on GitHub.

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