Quick TourΒΆ
This is the Lenses Quick Tour. Lenses helps you build streaming DataOps applications with Apache Kafka.
What Lenses can do
Lenses acts as a hub, helping you to access data, create flows and configure global data policies to manage your data platform.
At the core of Lenses is Lenses SQL, this engine allows all personas to build real time streaming flows and contribute to a organizations data driven journey.
What makes Lenses unique
Lenses is unique because it allows you to perform DataOps operations based on Kafka while offering its own query language for data at rest and data in motion.
Lenses SQL engine is an overlay engine, currently supporting Apache Kafka but in the future Lenses will also offer support for other streaming systems, for example Redis Streams.
Two versions of Lenses
Two versions of Lenses are available. Lenses Box, which is a Docker image that contains Lenses and a full installation of Kafka with all its relevant components, and Lenses Enterprise. The main different between these two versions is that Lenses Enterprise can connect to your own Kafka cluster whereas Lenses Box can only connect to one Kafka broker, by default the one found in the Docker image.
Lenses Box is free whereas Lenses Enterprise is a commercial product.
This quick tour will work with Lenses Box to create an end to end flows of inserting, visualizing, processing and extracting data. No code is required. At the time of writing this the latest Lenses Box version is 2.3, which is what will be used here.