Kafka for mission-critical applications

Axual Governance:
Control built in

Axual Governance provides centralized control over your streaming infrastructure. Role-based access control, audit capabilities, and schema management work together to ensure your architecture remains compliant as regulatory requirements evolve.

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Governance

How Governance works

Centralized control plane
UI, API, or IaC
Secure by design
Terraform

Self-service UI within boundaries

The governance layer operates independently from any Kafka infrastructure: managed services or self-hosted distributions. This vendor-agnostic separation ensures mission-critical streams continue during control plane maintenance. Define data ownership, manage applications and topics, enforce compliance, search content, and visualize dependencies through topic graphs, all without impacting message flow. Your producers keep processing while you address governance gaps across deployments. This pragmatic approach respects existing investments while ensuring future-proof control.

Multi-tenant by design

Teams create and manage topics, schemas, and applications through an intuitive web interface or automate everything via REST APIs and Terraform. The governance layer guides users through provisioning while enforcing your architectural standards. Every action, whether clicked or coded, flows through configurable approval workflows and role-based permissions. The result: development velocity without compromising control, delivered through the interface that suits your workflow.

Secure by design

Every governance action enforces security protocols by default. Role-based access control ensures only authorized personnel modify critical configurations. Operations authenticate through your existing identity provider via OIDC/SAML and service accounts with JWT tokens for CI/CD automation. All actions are logged for audit compliance. Sensitive credentials are encrypted in HashiCorp Vault, never exposed. Operational security is embedded in every workflow, protecting your infrastructure from configuration drift and unauthorized changes.

Terraform

Manage your entire streaming platform through Terraform. Define topics, schemas, applications, and access controls as declarative code. Version control your Kafka governance alongside your infrastructure. The Axual Terraform provider integrates with your existing CI/CD pipelines. This enables you to deploy consistent configurations across environments, roll back changes when needed, and maintain audit trails through Git history. This code-first approach transforms Kafka governance from manual clicks to automated, repeatable deployments. Your streaming infrastructure becomes as manageable as your application code.

Resilient data streaming

Core Governance capabilities

Effective Kafka governance requires more than access control. Schema evolution, audit trails, and multi-environment consistency are equally critical. Axual delivers these capabilities through integrated components that work together seamlessly.

Role-based access control

Define who can provision topics, deploy applications, or modify configurations. Map permissions to your organizational structure through groups and roles.

Schema registry

Control schema evolution across your streaming ecosystem. Enforce compatibility rules and track all versions with full lineage.

Audit Trail

Track every governance action with immutable logs. Meet compliance requirements for data lineage and access history.

API-First Architecture

Automate governance through REST APIs or Terraform. Integrate with CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows.

Connector management

Deploy Kafka Connect connectors through governance controls. Configure database, messaging, and cloud integrations with full audit trails.

Streaming applications

Run KSML applications with built-in governance. Deploy stream processing logic without compromising security policies.

De Volksbank Axual all-in-one-kafka platform for real-time data streamingrabobank Axual all-in-one-kafka platform for real-time data streaming

“We were at a crossroads, with legacy technology preventing a solid digital transformation, and an ambitious strategy for customer centricity underlining requirements for becoming data-driven. We really needed the Axual platform to allow us to make the leap.”

Roger Stoffers
Volksbank

"Data governance is critical at Rabobank. With Axual, we’re able to see who has permission, who owns the data, or if the owner has given permission and what the structure of the messages are.”

Vincent Oostindië
Rabobank

Axual has a clear focus on making Kafka usuable as a self-service platform. It enables teams to do their own thing in a controlled way. At the same time they provide a manageable platform on the infra side so that we can run it on-prem.

Joleen Breij
Eneco
Our Architecture
Regulatory compliance by design

The governance layer provides the audit capabilities, access controls, and data lineage tracking required for compliance, without constraining development velocity. You can use it to meet stringent regulatory requirements across sectors. Financial services maintain MiFID II audit trails and GDPR data controls. Healthcare organizations ensure patient data governance for national health regulations. Energy companies satisfy critical infrastructure security mandates and data types.

Operational control at scale

Axual Governance prevents topic sprawl through naming conventions and lifecycle management. Schema registry enforcement stops incompatible changes before they break downstream systems. Role-based access control scales with your organization, from ten users to thousands. What works for a pilot remains manageable in production.

Future-proof governance framework

Regulatory landscapes shift constantly. When new data protection laws emerge or audit standards evolve, your governance framework must adapt without architectural overhaul. Axual's governance layer handles changing requirements through configuration: update policies, add approval workflows, or implement new controls while your data flows continue uninterrupted. Your streaming architecture remains compliant as regulations evolve.

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Answers to your questions about Axual’s All-in-one Kafka Platform

Are you curious about our All-in-one Kafka platform? Dive into our FAQs for all the details you need, and find the answers to your burning questions.

How does Axual's governance layer work independently from our Kafka clusters?

Axual's control plane operates as a separate architectural layer from your Kafka infrastructure, whether that's Confluent Cloud, Amazon MSK, or self managed clusters. This separation means governance operations (creating topics, managing access, updating schemas) never impact message flow. Your producers and consumers continue processing while you address compliance gaps or update configurations. It's a pragmatic design choice: mission critical streams shouldn't fail because someone's updating access controls.

What happens to our existing Kafka governance when we implement Axual?

Your current topic naming conventions, ACLs, and operational procedures remain intact. Axual's governance layer wraps around existing deployments without requiring migration or disruption. You gain centralized control across all clusters through a single pane of glass, spanning both managed services and self hosted infrastructure. Think of it as retrofitting governance onto infrastructure that probably grew organically. The platform respects your investments while closing the governance gaps that emerge at scale.

How does role based access control scale from pilot to production?

RBAC in Axual maps to your organizational structure through groups and roles. Start with basic roles (Topic Owner, Application Developer) for your pilot team of ten. As you scale to hundreds of users across departments, the same permission model extends through group inheritance and delegated administration. Financial services implementations use this to separate trading system access from risk management data. Healthcare deployments isolate clinical departments while maintaining central oversight. The model that works for your proof of concept remains manageable at enterprise scale.

Can we maintain our GitOps workflows with Axual governance?

Absolutely. The Axual Terraform provider treats governance as code. Topics, schemas, applications, and access controls become declarative resources. Your existing CI/CD pipelines deploy Kafka configurations just like application infrastructure. Version control tracks every change, pull requests enforce review processes, and rollbacks restore previous states. This isn't just API automation; it's true infrastructure as code for streaming governance. Your platform engineers manage Kafka the same way they manage Kubernetes.

How does Axual ensure compliance with evolving regulations?

Every governance action creates an immutable audit trail documenting who accessed what, when, and why. Schema versioning tracks data structure evolution for lineage requirements. Role based access satisfies segregation of duties. But here's the critical part: when regulations change (and they will), you update policies through configuration, not architecture. New approval workflows, additional audit fields, or stricter access controls deploy without touching your streaming infrastructure. Your compliance posture evolves as quickly as regulatory requirements.

What's the operational overhead of running a separate governance layer?

Less than managing governance manually across multiple Kafka clusters. The control plane runs on Kubernetes with horizontal scaling and automated failover. During governance maintenance, your Kafka clusters continue operating normally. Producers produce, consumers consume. The Platform Manager, API Gateway, and UI are stateless services backed by a single management database. Think of it as trading the complexity of distributed governance for the simplicity of centralized control. Most enterprises find the operational burden decreases compared to their current multi cluster management.

How does schema management prevent breaking changes in production?

Axual enforces schema compatibility rules before changes reach Kafka. When a developer updates an Avro schema, the registry validates compatibility based on your configured rules: backward, forward, or full. Incompatible changes fail at registration, not when a critical consumer breaks at 3 AM. Every schema version is tracked with full lineage, so you can trace which applications use which versions. This is proactive protection against the schema evolution issues that plague DIY implementations.

Does Axual governance work with our existing identity provider and security policies?

Axual integrates with your corporate identity system through OIDC or SAML, whether that's Active Directory, Azure AD, or any enterprise IdP. Users authenticate with their existing credentials, inherit group memberships, and operate within familiar security boundaries. For automation, service accounts use JWT tokens that integrate with your CI/CD security policies. Sensitive credentials (database passwords for connectors, client certificates) store in HashiCorp Vault, never in configuration files.