Run the Whole-Payload Encryption Benchmark

This page reproduces the Whole-Payload Encryption Benchmark with the Aklivity fork of the OpenMessaging Benchmark (OMB) on AWS. The run sends the same workload through four setups: Apache Kafka directly, Zilla Plus with TLS passthrough, Zilla Plus with whole-payload encryption, and Zilla Plus with structured field encryption.

Provision the Environment

Clone and build the OMB fork:

git clone https://github.com/aklivity/openmessaging-benchmark.git
cd openmessaging-benchmark
mvn clean install -Dlicense.skip=true

Follow the prerequisites and Terraform steps in the deployment README with the 2cku setup. It provisions 3 Zilla Plus instances, 6 benchmark clients, 6 Kafka brokers, 3 controllers, and 1 Prometheus instance, all on m5.xlarge.

The deployment's templates/zilla.yaml defines a separate Zilla Plus listener for each encryption setup. Encryption keys come from a local filesystem vault, so no external KMS is needed.

Run the Workloads

From the OMB root directory, load your SSH key and generate the workloads:

eval $(ssh-agent)
ssh-add ~/.ssh/omb
./confluent-bin/create-blog-workloads.sh

Every setup runs the 1 KiB JSON event workload at 24 MB/s:

Setup	Scenario
Direct to Kafka	ak
TLS passthrough	zpak
Whole-payload encryption	zpak-encrypt
Structured field encryption	zpak-structured-field-encrypt

Run each setup in turn:

./confluent-bin/run-workloads.sh ak workloads/confluent-blog-workloads-2cku-1p-1c-1Kb-45topic-200part-24MBps.yaml
./confluent-bin/run-workloads.sh zpak workloads/confluent-blog-workloads-2cku-1p-1c-1Kb-45topic-200part-24MBps.yaml
./confluent-bin/run-workloads.sh zpak-encrypt workloads/confluent-blog-workloads-2cku-1p-1c-1Kb-45topic-200part-24MBps.yaml
./confluent-bin/run-workloads.sh zpak-structured-field-encrypt workloads/confluent-blog-workloads-2cku-1p-1c-1Kb-45topic-200part-24MBps.yaml

Each run uses a 30-minute warm-up and a 60-minute measurement.

Chart the Results

When a run completes, OMB writes output.txt to the results/ directory. Generate publish and end-to-end latency charts from it:

python3 ./bin/create_charts.py results/<your-result-folder>/output.txt

Tear Down

From the deployment directory, destroy the AWS resources:

cd driver-kafka/deploy/aklivity-deployment
terraform destroy