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The Kafka Target Connector defines the Apache Kafka cluster where your pipelines write output events, enabling Kafka-to-Kafka replication through Popsink. Use it to relay, fan out, or bridge event streams between clusters — for example from an on-premises cluster to a cloud-managed one — while applying Popsink transformations in between. This target only stores the broker connection and authentication for the sink cluster: source topics and consumer groups are configured on the Kafka source connector and on your subscriptions.

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Table of Contents

  1. Key Features
  2. Prerequisites
  3. Configuration
  4. Security Protocols

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Key Features

  • Kafka-to-Kafka pipelines: bridge event streams between clusters with Popsink transformations applied in flight.
  • Broad authentication support: PLAINTEXT, SSL, and SASL (PLAIN, SCRAM-SHA-256, SCRAM-SHA-512, OAUTHBEARER, GSSAPI).
  • Topic passthrough: output topic names follow your subscription configuration — no renaming is imposed by the target.

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Prerequisites

  • A reachable Kafka cluster to use as the sink.
  • Credentials with permission to produce to the target topics (and to create them, if they don’t pre-exist and auto-creation is disabled on the cluster).

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Configuration

FieldRequiredDescription
Bootstrap ServersYesComma-separated host:port pairs for the target cluster (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

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Security Protocols

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