Tim Berglund takes us through what has changed in Confluent Platform 5.4:
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
Back in July, we announced the preview for RBAC as part of the Confluent Platform 5.3 release. After gathering feedback and learning from everyone who tried it out, we are now pleased to announce the availability of RBAC in Confluent Platform 5.4. You can now make use of this feature in production environments with Confluent’s full support.
RBAC offers a centralized security implementation for enabling access to resources across the entire Confluent Platform with just the right level of granularity. You can control permissions you grant to users and groups to specific platform resources, starting at the cluster level and moving all the way down to individual topics, consumers groups, or even individual connectors. You do this by assigning users or groups to roles. This gets you out of the game of managing the individual permissions of a huge number of principals—a real problem for large enterprise deployments.
RBAC delivers comprehensive authorization enforced via all user interfaces (Confluent Control Center UI, CLI, and APIs), and across all Confluent Platform components (Control Center, Schema Registry, REST Proxy, MQTT Proxy, Kafka Connect, and KSQL). Given the distributed architecture not only of Apache Kafka but also of other platform components like Connect and KSQL, having a single framework to centrally manage and enforce security authorizations across all the components is, in a word, essential for managing security at scale.
Click through for several more features and where you can try it out, either on-premises or in a major cloud host.