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The Kafka Source Connector integrates with Apache Kafka, a distributed, fault-tolerant, and highly-scalable event streaming platform designed for handling real-time data streams. It enables the efficient publishing, storing, and processing of large volumes of events, making it ideal for building data pipelines, messaging systems, and real-time analytics applications. Kafka is widely used across various industries for its high throughput, low latency, and strong durability guarantees.

Key Features

  • Continuous consumption: the connector subscribes to your Kafka topics and streams events into Popsink as they are produced.
  • Broad authentication support: PLAINTEXT, SSL, and SASL (PLAIN, SCRAM-SHA-256, SCRAM-SHA-512, OAUTHBEARER, GSSAPI), including mutual TLS.
  • Message metadata: optionally include Kafka message metadata (topic, partition, offset, timestamp) alongside the payload.

Prerequisites

  • A reachable Kafka cluster.
  • Credentials with permission to read from the source topics (and to use the configured consumer group).

Configuration

FieldRequiredDescription
Bootstrap ServersYesComma-separated host:port pairs (e.g. kafka1.example.com:9092,kafka2.example.com:9092)
Security ProtocolYesPLAINTEXT, SSL, SASL_PLAINTEXT, or SASL_SSL
SASL MechanismWith SASLPLAIN, SCRAM-SHA-256, SCRAM-SHA-512, OAUTHBEARER, or GSSAPI
SASL Username / PasswordWith SASLCredentials for the chosen SASL mechanism
TopicYesKafka topic to consume from
Consumer Group IDNoConsumer group used to track offsets; auto-generated when omitted
Include MetadataNoInclude Kafka message metadata (topic, partition, offset, timestamp) in the records (default: false)

TLS and Mutual TLS

When connecting over SSL or SASL_SSL, you can additionally provide certificates (PEM or base64-encoded PEM):
FieldDescription
CA CertificateCA certificate used to verify the brokers
Client CertificateClient certificate for mutual TLS
Client Private KeyClient private key for mutual TLS

Security Protocols

ProtocolEncryptionAuthentication
PLAINTEXTNoneNone — development only
SSLTLSTLS client certificates (optional)
SASL_PLAINTEXTNoneSASL
SASL_SSLTLSSASL — recommended for production