about cairn
Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform maintainer, building your Kafka on-call in software.
Cairn is built by a senior engineer who maintains parts of Confluent Platform and contributes upstream across Apache Kafka, Netty, Spark, Thrift, and Shapeless. The default playbooks are drawn from incidents that actually cost teams SLA penalties — turned into an agent that closes the loop before the pager fires.
Now onboarding design-partner teams running on self-managed Confluent Platform, Confluent Cloud, MSK, and Redpanda.
what cairn closes
Kafka incident auto-remediation, not just alerts.
Most tooling tells you a consumer is lagging or a schema just broke. Cairn takes the next step and writes the incident report.
dlq · replay
DLQ replay
Consumer-lag drift triggers a rebalance-and-replay playbook. Poisoned messages drain from the dead-letter queue before a single page fires — and the loop records exactly what was replayed.
schema · rollback
Schema rollback
A BACKWARD-incompatible register gets pinned to the last compatible version in Schema Registry. Producers keep publishing through the older schema until a deliberate promotion is made.
broker · isr
Broker rebalance
On broker wobble, Cairn shrinks ISR before partitions go under-replicated, reassigns leaders to the healthiest brokers, and re-expands replication factor once the cluster is stable.
why close the loop
Observability shows the problem. Cairn ends it.
A page is not action. The pager only goes quiet if the loop closes itself — inside guardrails, with a report, and with a human escalation path when the line is crossed.
Guardrails you set
Every playbook runs inside a floor — replication minimum, DLQ cap, severity ceiling, target schema registry. Remediation that crosses the line escalates to a human instead of acting.
Reports you actually read
Every remediation ships with a plain-English incident report. It is written the way on-call engineers wish they had time to write theirs — and posted to Slack and PagerDuty when the loop closes.
Pager stays quiet
Cairn only pages a human when a real decision is genuinely required. Anomalies that close themselves inside the guardrails are recorded, not paged.
founder note
Built by someone who’s been on the other side of the page.
The founder has spent years on call for Kafka and the systems around it — Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, the cluster machinery that breaks at three in the morning when a single broker wobbles. That on-call experience is what shaped Cairn’s default playbooks. They are not theoretical. They are calibrated against the failures that actually cost teams SLA penalties — like the cascading-broker crash whose post-mortem laid out a six-figure loss against a single weekend outage.
Upstream contributions across Apache Kafka, Netty, Spark, Thrift, and Shapeless — and parts of Confluent Platform itself — are what make the integration read as something a Kafka team can trust on day one.
upstream Apache Kafka · Netty · Spark · Thrift · Shapeless · Confluent Platform
ready when you are
Talk to the team that built the playbooks.
Tell us how many clusters and which distribution — we will get back to you with a sized quote and trial install instructions the same day.