Use Cases

Kafka Gateway solves a recurring set of problems: exposing Kafka to clients that don't speak the Kafka wire protocol, streaming Kafka data to browsers and devices, and securing or partitioning access to a cluster. Each guide below walks through one scenario end to end, with a runnable zilla.yaml example and links to the underlying binding reference.

Protocol Mediation

Map REST endpoints directly onto Kafka produce and fetch operations with the http-kafka binding.

Terminate MQTT connections and store sessions, retained messages, and pub/sub traffic on Kafka topics with the mqtt-kafka binding.

Fan out a Kafka topic to browser clients as a Server-Sent Events stream with the sse-kafka binding.

Bridge gRPC unary and streaming calls to Kafka topics with the grpc-kafka binding.

Serve Kafka-backed REST and SSE APIs to web and mobile clients from a managed, auto-scaling proxy layer.

Secure and Multi-Tenant Access

Secure Public Access

Expose a Kafka cluster to the internet with TLS, wildcard DNS, and SASL, mTLS, or IAM authentication.

Secure Private Access

Give clients in other VPCs and accounts private, authenticated access to Kafka without exposing brokers.

Virtual Kafka Clusters

Partition a single physical Kafka cluster into isolated virtual clusters with their own topics, consumer groups, and access controls.

Dynamic Topic Aliases

Isolate each client's data on a shared external Kafka topic name by aliasing to a per-client internal topic, based on identity from a guard like aws-cognito.