Confluent is a software package to handle essential bootstrap and operation of scale-out server configurations. It incorporates a variety of functions relevant to that end:

  • Console Management
    • Arbitrate multi-user access
    • Full logging with fine grained timestamps
    • VT-aware buffering for quality reconstitution of a console after reconnect
  • Hardware Control: Essential operations using ipmi, redfish, and/or implementation specific plugins to implement features including:
    • Power on/off
    • Set next boot device (e.g. force network boot)
    • Configure BIOS/UEFI/BMC settings
    • Configure hardware storage controllers (e.g. create/delete raid arrays and set drive usage)
    • Health check
    • Telemetry (temperature, voltages, power, energy, etc)
    • Virtual USB device mount management
    • Retrieve support data
  • OS Deployment including:
    • Sample profiles for ESXi 6.7/7.0, RedHat/CentOS 7.x/8.x, SuSE 15.x, RHV-H 4.3/4.4 and Ubuntu 20.04
    • Deployment over PXE, HTTP(S)boot, or removable media (real or virtual)
    • Does not require a DHCP server, nor does it conflict with an external DHCP server for all deployment methods
    • Support customization during phases of deployment (e.g. post, firstboot, onboot) by local commands or automatically launched remote ansible playbooks.
  • Centralized access to network topology information
    • Access mac address table and lldp information across all switches in one interface
  • Rich device on-boarding capabilities
    • Detect generic PXE systems and Lenovo hardware management devices at a glance
    • Rapidly onboard devices manually, based on data such as serial number or mac address, or based on where things are physically plugged in to chassis or switches.
  • Scalability and Availability
    • Powerful noderange syntax to describe target systems simply but with great flexibility
    • An attribute database with group inheritance and formulaic attribute derivation for structured data-centers
    • Collective mode enables scaling a single confluent interface across multiple servers or virtual machines for HA and/or to manage thousands of systems
    • Tools to quickly analyze data and highlight inconsistencies or to do quick statistical analysis
  • Security
    • Designed with secure default behaviors with opt-in to reduced security
    • Use of fully validated TLS to protect collective, deployment and hardware management
    • Take advantage of TPM2 to protect boot volumes for supported profiles
    • Use TPM2 to persist node trust across reboots in stateless environments
    • Node authentication options to balance convenience versus hardening to protect potentially sensitive data such as encrypted root password
    • SSH PKI strategy to securely enable convenient SSH without users having to self-curate SSH keys or having to update known_hosts
    • SecureBoot is supported for media and HTTP boot methods
  • Flexible usage scenarios
    • Collection of straightforward Linux commands
    • Command line API browser that is like browsing a file-system
    • Python client library
    • REST API over HTTP