Kafka Connect is a tool for scalably and reliably streaming data between Apache Kafka and other systems. In this post, we discuss how to set up a data ingestion pipeline using Kafka connectors. Fake customer and order data is ingested into Kafka topics using the MSK Data Generator. Also, we use the Confluent S3 sink connector to save the messages of the topics into a S3 bucket. The Kafka Connect servers and individual connectors are deployed using the custom resources of Strimzi on Kubernetes.

Apache Kafka has five core APIs, and we can develop applications to send/read streams of data to/from topics in a Kafka cluster using the producer and consumer APIs. While the main Kafka project maintains only the Java APIs, there are several open source projects that provide the Kafka client APIs in Python. In this post, we discuss how to develop Kafka client applications using the kafka-python package on Kubernetes.

Apache Kafka is one of the key technologies for implementing data streaming architectures. Strimzi provides a way to run an Apache Kafka cluster and related resources on Kubernetes in various deployment configurations. In this series of posts, we will discuss how to create a Kafka cluster, to develop Kafka client applications in Python and to build a data pipeline using Kafka connectors on Kubernetes.