Web Streaming

Use CaseWeb StreamingZilla Plus

★Zilla Plus This use case is implemented by Zilla Plus, Aklivity's commercial edition of Kafka Gateway.

The Problem

Web and mobile clients need to publish, update, and stream messages against a Kafka topic in a managed cluster like Amazon MSK or Confluent Cloud. Exposing brokers directly to browsers isn't an option, and operating your own REST and SSE proxy layer in front of Kafka means owning TLS certificates, auto-scaling, and load balancing yourself.

How Zilla Solves It

Zilla Plus automates the deployment of a stateless, auto-scaling fleet of Web Streaming proxies behind a network load balancer, in front of your Amazon MSK or Confluent Cloud cluster. The proxies expose customizable REST and SSE APIs backed by the same http-kafka and sse-kafka binding capabilities described in HTTP to Kafka and SSE from Kafka, so web clients read and write Kafka messages with no code changes to the cluster itself.

You choose a wildcard DNS pattern for public access to the Web Streaming proxies; those names resolve to the deployed proxy fleet, which presents a matching TLS server certificate.

Architecture

Key Features

Web clients publish, update, and stream Kafka messages via customizable REST and SSE APIs.
No configuration changes required to the Kafka cluster to enable web access.
Auto-scaling proxy fleet deployed behind a network load balancer for high availability.

Deploy

Amazon MSK

Web Streaming with CDK: generate or deploy a custom AWS CDK stack that exposes a custom REST path using SASL/SCRAM authentication.
Web Streaming with Terraform: deploy the same proxy using a CDKTF Terraform template.

Confluent Cloud

Web Streaming with CDK: generate or deploy a custom CDK stack for Confluent Cloud.