Automated Continuous LDAP Replication to Apache Kafka

Always-on applications rely on automatic failover capabilities and real-time data access. CData Sync integrates live LDAP objects into your Apache Kafka instance, allowing you to consolidate all of your data into a single location for archiving, reporting, analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and more.

Configure Apache Kafka as a Replication Destination

Using CData Sync, you can replicate LDAP objects to Kafka. To add a replication destination, navigate to the Connections tab.

1. Click Add Connection.
2. Select Apache Kafka as a destination.
3. Enter the necessary connection properties:
   • Bootstrap Servers - Enter the address of the Apache Kafka Bootstrap servers to which you want to connect.
   • Auth Scheme - Select the authentication scheme. Plain is the default setting. For this setting, specify your login credentials:
   • User - Enter the username that you use to authenticate to Apache Kafka.
   • Password - Enter the password that you use to authenticate to Apache Kafka.
   • Type Detection Scheme - Specify the detection-scheme type (None, RowScan, SchemaRegistry, or MessageOnly) that you want to use. The default type is None.
   • Use SSL - Specify whether you want to use the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol. The default value is False.
4. Click Test Connection to ensure that the connection is configured properly.
5. Click Save Changes.

Configure the LDAP Connection

You can configure a connection to LDAP from the Connections tab. To add a connection to your LDAP account, navigate to the Connections tab.

1. Click Add Connection.
2. Select a source (LDAP).
3. Configure the connection properties.
   
   

   To establish a connection, the following properties under the Authentication section must be provided:

   • Valid User and Password credentials (e.g., Domain\BobF or cn=Bob F,ou=Employees,dc=Domain).
   • Server information, including the IP or host name of the Server, as well as the Port.

   • BaseDN: This will limit the scope of LDAP searches to the height of the distinguished name provided.

     Note: Specifying a narrow BaseDN may greatly increase performance; for example, cn=users,dc=domain will only return results contained within cn=users and its children.

4. Click Connect to ensure that the connection is configured properly.
5. Click Save Changes.

Configure Replication Queries

CData Sync enables you to control replication with a point-and-click interface and with SQL queries. For each replication you wish to configure, navigate to the Jobs tab and click Add Job. Select the Source and Destination for your replication.

Replicate Entire Tables

To replicate an entire table, click Add Tables in the Tables section, choose the table(s) you wish to replicate, and click Add Selected Tables.

Customize Your Replication

You can use the Columns and Query tabs of a task to customize your replication. The Columns tab allows you to specify which columns to replicate, rename the columns at the destination, and even perform operations on the source data before replicating. The Query tab allows you to add filters, grouping, and sorting to the replication.

Schedule Your Replication

In the Schedule section, you can schedule a job to run automatically, configuring the job to run after specified intervals ranging from once every 10 minutes to once every month.

Once you have configured the replication job, click Save Changes. You can configure any number of jobs to manage the replication of your LDAP objects to Kafka.