2. Quickstart

Parrot Stream would not exist without these great pieces of software:

• Debezium: it is thanks to Debezium Connectors that data stream from the sources to the Kafka topics
• Apache Kafka: Kafka is actually widely used for building real-time data pipelines thanks to its strength in horizontal scalability, fault tolerance and extremely low latency
• Confluent Schema Registry: provides a serving layer for your metadata. It provides a RESTful interface for storing and retrieving Avro schemas. It stores a versioned history of all schemas, provides multiple compatibility settings and allows evolution of schemas according to the configured compatibility setting. It provides serializers that plug into Kafka clients that handle schema storage and retrieval for Kafka messages that are sent in the Avro format
• Confluent Kafka Connect: Kafka Connect is a framework for scalably and reliably streaming data between Apache Kafka and other data systems. Parrot Stream is a Kafka Connect distribution which come with its own source and sink connectors together with other Confluent and community ones

2.1. Distributions

Parrot Stream comes in three flavours, at the moment:

• a Cloudera Distribution you can easily distribute Parrot Stream as parcels into a Cloudera Cluster and manage it with Cloudera Manager. You can donwload Cloudera Manager and use it in its Express Edition to create and manage your cluster in an on premise configuration or you can setup a cluster deployment in Amazon AWS EC2, Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure with Cloudera Director.
• a Dockerized Distribution you can easily distribute Parrot Strea as a docker.
• a Development Distribution with all the necessary components to make the Parrot Stream up & running in minutes. This kind of distribution is intended just for development and testing purposes.