Connect Permissive SSL

Kpow provides a new environment variable to allow SSL connections to Kafka Connect where the SSL certificate is deliberately not validated.

This allows you to use self-signed or otherwise unvalidated certificates to secure Kafka Connect.

This variable defaults to false. Enable with:

CONNECT_PERMISSIVE_SSL=true

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Operatr is now Kpow!

Now seems the time to drop the (frankly unfortunate) previous name and re-launch our flagship engineering toolkit for Apache Kafka as Kpow.

In practical terms for you this means very little, though in time our artifacts will be released to operatr/kpow in Dockerhub rather than operatr/operatr.

To coincide with the arrival of new products and rebranding we have three new online resources:

• factorhouse.io for information about Factor House as a company and all of our products
• factorhouse.io/kpow for information about Kpow, including release notes and artifacts
• docs.kpow.io for the new, Gitbook powered Kpow User Guide!

LDAP, File, and JDBC Authentication via Jetty JAAS

Release 60 brings support for a variety of new User Authentication options, including LDAP, File, or JDBC, and all documented in our new User Guide!

Kpow v60 also provides an enhanced UI with new Profile and Access Control pages.

Visualize and Control Consumption and Compute

The most exciting feature of Kpow v60 is our new Compute Console.

Kpow now offers the ability to visualize and monitor Consumer Group topologies in real-time (when coupled with Live Mode).

More than monitoring - the Compute Console allows you to reset consumer group offsets at a group, host, member, topic, or assignment level. Kpow will schedule the reset and effect the action once you stop your consumer group. Scheduled mutations expire after 15 minutes and can be cancelled at any time.

We will soon extend the Compute Console to cover Kafka Streams topologies as well.

As this is a feature preview we would love your feedback, get us on Slack!

SAML Session Management

Kpow provides a new environment variable to control user SAML session duration.

This allows you to better manage the UX of authenticated users by choosing the period in which Kpow will cache a user's authenticated credentials.

SAML session duration defaults to 3600s (1 hour) and can be modified by setting the SAML_SESSION_S environment variable.

SAML_SESSION_S=3600

Release #58 fixes a bug where Kpow with SAML SSO is installed behind a reverse-proxy providing HTTPS termination.

Kpow will now respect the http/https scheme throughout authentication where an AUTH_LANDING_URI is configured.

Release #57 improves Kpow's resilience when integrating with Kafka Connect.

Kpow supports two new RBAC configuration parameters:

saml:
  role_field: "Groups"
  authenticated_roles: ["foo" "bar"]

role_field specifies the field in your authentication payload that identifies user roles.

authenticated_roles restricts access to strictly users with at least on of the listed roles.