KAFKA SUPPORT
Whether you’re operating Kafka at scale, dealing with governance, or trying to lock down data protection, we have specialist partners who’ve solved these problems, and the architecture knowledge to make sure the right one is working on yours.
Kafka becomes critical infrastructure fast. The operational and governance challenge follows.
“Most teams adopt Kafka for a specific use case. It works. More teams adopt it. More topics, more applications, more clusters. Suddenly you have a platform that’s doing serious work and a set of operational and governance challenges that grew faster than anyone planned for.”
Gabor | Engineering Lead
OPERATIONS
The infrastructure itself becomes a burden. Keeping clusters stable, managing upgrades without taking down production, tuning for workload changes, dealing with the 3am alert that nobody on the on-call rotation actually knows how to resolve. The cost – in engineering time and in risk – is higher than it looks.
GOVERNANCE & CONTROL
Kafka grows faster than the platform team can keep up with. Developers are filing tickets for access. Nobody has visibility across the full estate. Data protection policies exist in theory but enforcement is inconsistent. Misconfigurations reach production because there’s no validation layer. Audits are painful. The platform team is firefighting instead of building.
What We Offer
Vetted partners, carefully matched. We know the difference.
Kafka services are delivered through carefully selected and vetted specialist partners. We don’t have one partner we refer you to; we have relationships across different Kafka capability areas and match the right expertise to the right problem. We manage the engagement throughout, provide architecture advisory, and stay accountable for the outcome.
What this looks like in practice:
MANAGED KAFKA INFRASTRUCTURE
Production-ready Kafka, fully operated. Deployment, monitoring, upgrades, failover, and 24/7 expert coverage, available across major cloud providers and on-premises. For teams who want Kafka’s capabilities without building the operational function to support it
KAFKA GOVERNANCE & VISIBILITY
A governance layer that scales with your platform. Developer self-service within guardrails, granular access control at the user and group level, visibility across clusters and topics, audit trails for compliance, and cost attribution by team. Platform teams stop drowning in tickets. Developers stop waiting for access.
KAFKA SECURITY & DATA PROTECTION
Centralised encryption, data masking, and quality enforcement at the infrastructure layer – without changing application code. Field-level protection for PII and sensitive data, configurable data quality validation that blocks malformed records before they reach production, and cryptographic signing for audit and chain-of-custody requirements.
ARCHITECTURE
ADVISORY
Whether Kafka is the right tool for a specific workload, how it sits alongside your existing messaging infrastructure, whether your topic and partition design will hold at scale. This is the layer of advice that managed services and platform tooling don’t provide. It requires knowing the landscape across multiple messaging technologies – which is what we do.
MIGRATION & MODERNISATION
Moving from self-managed Kafka, a proprietary streaming platform, or consolidating clusters to reduce infrastructure costs. Zero-downtime migration is achievable with the right planning and the right tooling. We manage the partner relationship and make sure the cutover doesn’t become a production incident.
Why Seventh State?
No blind referrals
We have relationships with specialist partners across Kafka operations, governance, and security.
We selected each one because we assessed their depth – not because they were available. The partner you work with through us is the one that’s right for your specific problem.
No architecture guesswork
Kafka specialists know Kafka. We know how Kafka fits (or doesn’t) alongside RabbitMQ, NATS, and the rest of your messaging estate.
That broader architectural view is what we bring to every engagement, whatever the technology.
No fragmented relationships
Many teams are running more than one messaging technology. If you have RabbitMQ alongside Kafka, or you’re evaluating NATS for specific workloads, you don’t need a separate conversation for each.
One relationship. The full capability map behind it.
Partner Stories
5x growth. Same team.
A global postal and logistics provider was running Kafka at significant scale – hundreds of applications across the organisation, with a platform team that couldn’t keep pace with access requests. The problem wasn’t Kafka. It was the operational model: every developer needed the platform team to provision access, and the platform team had no headspace for anything else.
The shift was structural. Developers gained self-service access within automated guardrails. The platform team moved from provisioning requests to governing standards. Kafka applications grew fivefold. The platform team didn’t.
Data that was a cost centre became a revenue stream.
A large manufacturer was sharing operational data with external partners via weekly batch exports – slow, manual, with no governance over who accessed what. The opportunity for real-time data sharing existed. The infrastructure to do it securely didn’t.
The solution was a governance and proxy layer: isolated virtual clusters per partner, field-level encryption, per-partner rate limiting, and topic aliasing so external parties never saw internal naming or structure. Partner onboarding went from months to weeks. The data programme became a commercial product.
Let’s talk…
Whether it’s an operational problem, a governance problem, a security gap, or all three – start with a conversation about what you’ve actually got.
Alternatively:
Email us: sales@seventhstate.io
Call us: (+44) 02045725726
Book a meeting: in the calendar
Frequently Asked Questions
What Kafka services does Seventh State offer?
Seventh State provides Kafka services across managed infrastructure, governance and visibility, security and data protection, architecture advisory, and migration – delivered through carefully selected and vetted specialist partners. The right partner depends on the specific problem: some teams need better operations, some need governance and control, some need both.
What is Kafka governance and why does it matter?
Kafka governance covers who can access what, how standards are enforced, how data quality is maintained, and how compliance requirements are met across the messaging estate. As Kafka scales across teams, the governance challenge grows faster than most platform teams anticipate. Without a governance layer, platform teams spend most of their time provisioning access rather than maintaining standards – and misconfiguration risk increases.
What is managed Kafka and when does it make sense?
Managed Kafka means a specialist provider handles the operational layer: deployment, configuration, tuning, upgrades, monitoring, and 24/7 incident response. It makes sense when the engineering cost of running Kafka in-house – the expertise required, the ongoing maintenance, the round-the-clock coverage – exceeds the value of full internal control. Most teams underestimate that cost until they’re already carrying it.
Can Kafka security and data protection be enforced without changing application code?
Yes. A proxy or gateway layer can enforce encryption, data masking, data quality validation, and access policies at the infrastructure level – transparently, without any changes to the applications that produce or consume from Kafka. This is significant for teams where enforcing consistent data protection per-application is impractical.
How does Seventh State decide which Kafka partner is right for a client?
We have relationships with specialist partners across different Kafka capability areas. The right one depends on the specific problem – whether that’s operational overhead, governance gaps, data protection requirements, or migration needs. We assess the situation first and recommend accordingly, rather than defaulting to a single partner regardless of the problem.
Does Seventh State manage Kafka directly?
Kafka delivery is through our specialist partner network. Seventh State provides architecture advisory, oversees the engagement, and maintains accountability throughout. We also bring the cross-technology perspective – across RabbitMQ, Kafka, NATS, and beyond – that a Kafka-only partner cannot.
Can Kafka be migrated to a new provider with zero downtime?
Zero-downtime migration between Kafka providers – including from proprietary platforms like Confluent to open-source alternatives, or from self-managed clusters to a managed service – is achievable with the right approach. It requires careful planning, the right tooling, and someone who understands the failure modes. That’s what we help with.
