This page describes an overview of Lenses.
Lenses is the leading developer experience and UI for exploring and moving real-time data, across any Kafka, on any cloud or on premise. We are on a mission to create an operating fabric to increase developer productivity on real-time data.
Lenses is an application that connects to your Kafka environments, allowing you to manage, discover, explore and catalogue your data via SQL. You can also deploy and monitor stream processing applications (SQL Processors) and Kafka Connectors, all wrapped in an enterprize grade RBAC layer.
All Lenses needs is connectivity to your services, think of it as a Kafka client.
The diagram gives a high-level overview of the logical components. At the core of Lenses, we have:
A Kafka UI for day-to-day work with Kafka
SQL Engine to query data and create streaming apps leveraging Kafka Streams
App Engine to manage seamless deployments of SQL apps (deployed to Kubernetes)
Metadata Engine to create a real-time Data Catalog for cross-system datasets and apps
Lenses is a JVM application exposes secure restful APIs and websockets in addition to providing a Kafka UI. A CLI is available to help automate operations.