To try out Event Streams, you have the following options:
- Create a subscription for a fully managed Kafka service on IBM Cloud.
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Install Event Streams on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform for development purposes or to set up Kafka for production use, and benefit from both the support of IBM and the open-source community.
Event Streams comes with a host of useful features such as a user interface (UI) to help you get started with Kafka and help operate a production cluster, geo-replication of topics between clusters, a schema registry to enforce correct and consistent message formats, a catalog of connectors, converters, and transformations for Kafka Connect, and more.
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Use Strimzi if you want to install your own basic Kafka cluster on Kubernetes for testing and proof-of-concept purposes.
As Event Streams is based on Strimzi, you can easily move your deployment to Event Streams later, and keep your existing configurations and preferences from the Strimzi setup. Moving to Event Streams adds the benefit of full enterprise-level support from IBM.