Introducing the Zilla Data Platform

For years, APIs have revolved around REST. The tools, the gateways, the governance, all built for request/response interactions. But the world has moved on.

Today’s systems —from ePayments to IoT, from hyper personalization engines to observability pipelines— don’t make single API calls anymore. They run on continuous streams of events.

And yet, there’s hasn't been a real API platform designed for streaming. Until now.

Introducing the Zilla Data Platform

At Aklivity, we started with a simple mission: make real-time apps and systems as easy to build as REST-based ones. To do that, we first built the Zilla Gateway — a highly performant Kafka-native proxy that abstracts Apache Kafka behind user-defined, stateless APIs. It lets developers connect to streaming data without wading through partitions, offsets, or protocol mismatches. It also enables security and schema validation on the fly for native Kafka clients.

But as we engaged with countless enterprise data teams running Kafka, one challenge kept surfacing: data governance and management...

• Who owns this stream?
• What schema does it use?
• How do we control access?
• How do we version and evolve it safely?

These questions underscored a pressing gap between streaming infrastructure and enterprise governance. A gap we're closing with the Zilla Data Platform.

Zilla Platform gives teams a unified way to explore, design, and deploy event-driven APIs with governance, security, and observability built in. It automates discovery, documentation, and deployment, turning Kafka topics into well-defined, reusable, and governed real-time data products.

A Platform Built for Real-Time

The Zilla Platform is structured around three planes that mirror how enterprises operate data at scale:

• Management Plane — where teams design APIs, manage data products, and define organizational policy.
• Control Plane — where definitions and policies are translated into executable instructions for runtime environments.
• Data Plane — where it all comes to life, powered by Zilla Gateways mediating and securing real-time data flows across Kafka and beyond.

Together, these planes create the foundation for a streaming-native control and governance system. One that finally brings full-lifecycle API management to event-driven data.

Management Plane

The Management Plane is the brain of the Zilla Data Platform. It’s where teams design streaming APIs, manage data products, and enforce organizational policy.

At a high level, the Management Plane orchestrates the following:

• User interface for designing APIs, packaging Data Products, managing access, and monitoring environments.
• Persistent knowledge of organizational metadata, configurations, and audit history.
• Handles identity and access management, including initial admin user setup, role-based permissions, and user & team onboarding.

Control Plane

If the management plane defines intent, the Control Plane makes it real.

It serves as the execution layer that translates design-time definitions and governance policies into runtime configurations deployed across connected Zilla Gateways.

At a high level, the Control Plane orchestrates the following:

• Translating API designs, data product definitions, and policies into executable instructions for the Data Plane.
• Manage and synchronizes runtime environments.
• Bootstraps and coordinates services, handling internal communications, service discovery, and configuration propagation through Kafka-backed streams.

Data Plane

The Data Plane is where the action happens. Powered by Zilla Gateways.

The runtime layer that executes the configurations, policies, and API definitions delivered from the Control Plane. It's powered by Zilla Gateways, which mediate, secure, and broker real-time data flows across Kafka and other protocols.

At a high level, the Data Plane operates as follows:

• Executes real-time APIs and Data Products through Zilla Gateways.
• Enables multi-protocol interoperability without custom middleware.
• Gateway interfaces natively with Kafka clusters & Schema registries.

A Unified Data Management Experience

The Zilla Platform  provides a role-based user experience that brings together platform owners, API designers, and developers.

It provides a unified workflow from data exploration to API deployment, reducing friction across the data product lifecycle.

1. Explore Kafka Clusters & Schema Registries to discover topics, inspect schemas & ACLs.
2. Extract AsyncAPI specifications from configured environments.
3. Design APIs and Data products by defining operations, schemas, and access policies with precision.
4. Deploy Real-time data products to a self-serve catalog.

Enabling Platform Owners

Platform teams manage underlying infrastructure and are responsible for ensuring that an organization's data is governable, discoverable and accessible. The Zilla Data Platform supports connecting infrastructure, enforcing data quality and access policies, and promoting API data products into managed environments with ease. It streamlines setup by allowing teams to register Kafka clusters, schema registries, and Zilla Gateways, while providing deep visibility to explore topics and schemas in real time.

Platform Owners can:

• Explore Kafka clusters and Schema Registries to discover topics, schemas, and ACLs.
• Review Kafka Brokers across various environments.
• Observe data product usage and performance metrics.
• Publish API data products into a data catalog, making them available for discovery and subscription by applications and developers.

Enabling API Designers

API Designers or Architects focus on the Design phase of the lifecycle, but their work often begins by exploring existing streams and specifications made available by platform teams.

Designers can:

• Extract a starter AsyncAPI spec based on Kafka topics & registries.
• Extend or refine extracted specs by defining operations, payload types, rate limits and access policies.
• Apply data quality rules through validation and schema enforcement to ensure consistency and reliability for in-bound real-time data streams.
• Enforce data security controls such as masking and encryption, aligning with organizational governance and compliance standards.

Enabling Developers

Platform teams publish API data products into centralized catalogs, enabling developers to discover, access, and subscribe to business-ready real-time data streams through streamlined self-service workflows.

Developers can:

• Discover available APIs and Data Products through the self-service catalog.
• Subscribe to API products, by creating an application and generating an API key.
• Use the application ID and API key as credentials to securely access APIs.

Why It Matters

Real-time data is no longer a niche concern. It’s the connective tissue of digital experiences, intelligent automation, and IoT-scale operations.

But for streaming to take its rightful place at the center of enterprise architecture, it must be structured, governed, and reusable, not locked away in clusters or pipelines. That’s what the Zilla Data Platform makes possible.

By enabling teams to shift-left, the Zilla Data Platform moves validation, governance, and processing closer to where data is produced, improving quality, reducing cost, and accelerating delivery. Using AsyncAPI as living infrastructure, it transforms raw event streams into governed, reusable real-time data products that applications can depend on with confidence.

We’re now opening early access for select partners and technology leaders to experience the platform firsthand and help shape what comes next.

👉 Request Early Access