Kafka Connect is a tool for scalably and reliably streaming data between Apache Kafka and other systems. In this post, I will illustrate how to set up a data ingestion pipeline using Kafka connectors. Fake customer and order data will be ingested into the corresponding topics using the MSK Data Generator source connector. The topic messages will then be saved into a S3 bucket using the Confluent S3 sink connector.

A Kafka management app can be a good companion for development, which helps monitor and manage resources on an easy-to-use user interface. An app can be more useful if it supports features that are desirable for Kafka development on AWS. Those features cover IAM access control and integration with MSK Connect and Glue Schema Registry. In this post, I'll introduce several management apps that meet those requirements.

I recently obtained the Confluent Certified Developer for Apache Kafka (CCDAK) certification. It focuses on knowledge of developing applications that work with Kafka, and is targeted to developers and solutions architects. As it assumes Java APIs for development and testing, I am contacted to share how I prepared for it as a non-Java developer from time to time. I thought it would be better to write a post to summarise how I did it rather than answering to them individually.

Apache Kafka is one of the key technologies for modern data streaming architectures on AWS. Developing and testing Kafka-related applications can be easier using Docker and Docker Compose. In this series of posts, I will demonstrate reference implementations of those applications in Dockerized environments.

Kafka Connect is a tool for scalably and reliably streaming data between Apache Kafka and other systems. It can be used to build real-time data pipeline on AWS effectively. In this post, I will introduce available Kafka connectors mainly for AWS services integration. Also, developing and deploying some of them will be covered in later posts.

Glue Schema Registry provides a centralized repository for managing and validating schemas for topic message data. Its features can be utilized by many AWS services when building data streaming applications. In this post, we will discuss how to integrate Python Kafka producer and consumer apps in AWS Lambda with the Glue Schema Registry.

Streaming ingestion from Kafka (MSK) into Redshift and Athena can be much simpler as they now support direct integration. In part 2, we discuss an end-to-end streaming ingestion solution using EventBridge, Lambda, MSK and Athena. We also use AWS SAM integrated with Terraform for developing the producer Lambda function locally.

Streaming ingestion from Kafka (MSK) into Redshift and Athena can be much simpler as they now support direct integration. In part 1, we discuss an end-to-end streaming ingestion solution using EventBridge, Lambda, MSK and Redshift. We also use AWS SAM integrated with Terraform for developing the producer Lambda function locally.

We will discuss how to configure the Kafka consumer to seek offsets by timestamp where topic partitions are dynamically assigned by subscription. Docker Compose is used for building a single node Kafka cluster and running multiple consumer instances.

We'll continue the discussion of a Change Data Capture (CDC) solution with a schema registry and its deployment to AWS. All major resources are deployed in private subnets and VPN is used to access them in order to improve developer experience. The Apicurio registry is used as the schema registry service and it is deployed as an ECS service. In order for the connectors to have access to the registry, the Confluent Avro Converter is packaged together with the connector sources. The post ends with illustrating how schema evolution is managed by the schema registry.