Kafka Connect

Kafka Connect is a free, open-source component of Apache Kafka® that works as a centralized data hub for simple data integration between databases, key-value stores, search indexes, and file systems. The information in this page is specific to Kafka Connect for Confluent Platform. 

Confluent Cloud offers pre-built, fully managed, Kafka connectors that make it easy to instantly connect to popular data sources and sinks. With a simple GUI-based configuration and elastic scaling with no infrastructure to manage, Confluent Cloud connectors make moving data in and out of Kafka an effortless task, giving you more time to focus on application development.

You can deploy Kafka Connect as a standalone process that runs jobs on a single machine (for example, log collection), or as a distributed, scalable, fault-tolerant service supporting an entire organization. Kafka Connect provides a low barrier to entry and low operational overhead. You can start small with a standalone environment for development and testing, and then scale up to a full production environment to support the data pipeline of a large organization.

Benefits of Kafka Connect:

• Data-centric pipeline: Connect uses meaningful data abstractions to pull or push data to Kafka.
• Flexibility and scalability: Connect runs with streaming and batch-oriented systems on a single node (standalone) or scaled to an organization-wide service (distributed).
• Reusability and extensibility: Connect leverages existing connectors or extends them to fit your needs and provides lower time to production.

Types of connectors:

1. Source connector: Source connectors ingest entire databases and stream table updates to Kafka topics. Source connectors can also collect metrics from all your application servers and store the data in Kafka topics–making the data available for stream processing with low latency.
2. Sink connector: Sink connectors deliver data from Kafka topics to secondary indexes, such as Elasticsearch, or batch systems such as Hadoop for offline analysis.