//standard description for cruise control
[role="_abstract"]
Cruise Control is an open source system that supports the following Kafka operations:

* Monitoring cluster workload
* Rebalancing a cluster based on predefined constraints

The operations help with running a more balanced Kafka cluster that uses broker pods more efficiently.

A typical cluster can become unevenly loaded over time.
Partitions that handle large amounts of message traffic might not be evenly distributed across the available brokers.
To rebalance the cluster, administrators must monitor the load on brokers and manually reassign busy partitions to brokers with spare capacity.

Cruise Control automates the cluster rebalancing process.
It constructs a _workload model_ of resource utilization for the cluster--based on CPU, disk, and network load--and generates optimization proposals (that you can approve or reject) for more balanced partition assignments.
A set of configurable optimization goals is used to calculate these proposals.

You can generate optimization proposals in specific modes. 
The default `full` mode rebalances partitions across all brokers.
You can also use the `add-brokers` and `remove-brokers` modes to accommodate changes when scaling a cluster up or down.

When you approve an optimization proposal, Cruise Control applies it to your Kafka cluster.
You configure and generate optimization proposals using a `KafkaRebalance` resource.
You can configure the resource using an annotation so that optimization proposals are approved automatically or manually.  