Navigating Private Network Connectivity Options for Kafka Clusters

There are various strategies for securely connecting to Kafka clusters between different networks or over the public internet. Many cloud providers even offer endpoints that privately route traffic between networks and are not exposed to the internet. But, depending on your network setup and how you are running Kafka, these options ... might not be an option!

In this session, we’ll discuss how you can use SSH bastions or a self managed PrivateLink endpoint to establish connectivity to your Kafka clusters without exposing brokers directly to the internet. We explain the required network configuration, and show how we at Materialize have contributed to librdkafka to simplify these scenarios and avoid fragile workarounds.