IBM® Open Enterprise SDK for Apache Kafka® is a no-charge SDK that allows COBOL or C/C++ code running on z/OS® to natively communicate with a Kafka broker and to transform between COBOL copybooks and JSON events.

Many z/OS application architects and developers face the challenge of integrating their applications with Kafka clusters due to unclear options and reliance on external technologies, hindering their autonomy and solution implementation.

IBM Open Enterprise SDK for Apache Kafka is a revolutionary solution that enables a direct connection between IBM mainframes and Kafka clusters. Empowering developers to consume and publish events independently from their native applications, it provides: 

• direct connection to any Kafka cluster on the z/OS platform
• seamless consumption and publishing of Kafka events from native COBOL or C/C++ applications
• bypassing of intermediary layers such as Java, MQ or CICS for autonomy in solution implementation
• inclusion of COBOL and C/C++ samples for easy application development
• effortless data transformation between native COBOL copybooks and JSON event formats for simplified integration

Features

• **Kafka Producer APIs: **Enable an application to publish a stream to a Kafka topic. Kafka Producer APIs can be called from COBOL or C/C++ source code.
• **Kafka Consumer APIs: **Enable an application to subscribe to one or more topics and to ingest and process the stream stored in the topic. Kafka Consumer APIs can work with records in the topic in real-time, or they can ingest and process past records. Kafka Consumer APIs can be called from COBOL or C/C++ source code.
• **Data transformation utility: **Transform between native COBOL copybooks and the event format in JSON, which eases the use of the Kafka APIs.

Benefits

• **Simplify the connection to Kafka: **Use the Kafka APIs to directly call your Kafka broker from COBOL or C/C++ source code on z/OS.
• **Modernize your applications: **Extend your z/OS native COBOL or C/C++ applications to consume and publish Kafka events to the Kafka broker.
• **Ease data transformation: **Use the data transformation utility to transform between COBOL copybooks and the event format in JSON.