Axual Architecture & Components

All interactions with the Governance Layer start with an https request to 1 API Gateway that 2 first checks authentication and authorization with Keycloak. Keycloak is 3 connected with an Identity Provider (LDAP, EntraID, etc) via OpenID Connect (OIDC). The Keycloak configuration is 4 stored in a database.
After interacting with Keycloak, some request bodies are modified, (for example, for Topic Browse) to contain everything needed to 5 interact with the Platform UI, Platform Manager (API) and Topic Browse.
Platform Manager 6 creates and configures Kafka topics by creating a Kafka AdminClient using credentials 18 stored in Vault, while 7 storing the details in a database. Platform Manager also 6 stores schemas in Schema Registries.
Topic Browse can 8 query topic data of all managed clusters and present it to the end user.

On first startup of the platform, API Gateway 9a starts a wizard process on the components/governance/organization-manager/index.adoc to 9b create a Tenant and admin user in Keycloak. This is a one-time process after which the OM can be disabled.

A producer or consumer application can 10 reach the Apache Kafka cluster using kafka protocols on Kafka listeners, optionally using 11 Schema Registry over https. Schema registry 12 stores schemas on a topic.
Some applications without kafka protocol support can use the 13 Rest Proxy instead, that in turn 14 connects to Kafka.
Axual Connect (Kafka Connect) can quickly move data 15 from or into Kafka, 16 from or into external systems like MQ or a data lake. Security details of Connectors are 17 stored inside Vault, after being 18 written to Vault by Platform Manager
Axual Distributor 19 reads data from Kafka and 20 writes data into another cluster that is synchronous with the source cluster.

The Metrics Exposer gathers metric data from Prometheus and 21 exposes the data for dashboard creation outside the ESP infrastructure.
Optionally, Platform Metric Provider can 22 periodically write timestamped records to Kafka to gather distribution latencies for example.