Amazon MSK broker types - Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka
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Amazon MSK broker types

MSK Provisioned offers two broker types - Standard and Express. Standard brokers give you the most flexibility to configure your clusters, while Express brokers offer more elasticity, throughput, resilience, and ease-of-use for running high performance streaming applications. See the sub-sections below for more details on each offering. The table below also highlights the key feature comparison between Standard and Express brokers.

MSK Provisioned Broker Types Comparison
Feature Standard broker Express broker

Storage Management

Customer managed (Features include EBS storage, Tiered storage, Provisioned storage throughput, Auto-scaling, Storage capacity alerts)

Fully MSK managed

Supported instances

T3, M5, M7g

M7g

Sizing and scaling considerations

Throughput, connections, partitions, storage

Throughput, connections, partitions
Broker scaling Vertical and horizontal scaling Vertical and horizontal scaling

Kafka versions

See Apache Kafka versions

Starts at version 3.6

Apache Kafka Configuration

More configurable

Mostly MSK managed for higher resilience
Security

Encryption, Private/Public access, Authentication & Authorization - IAM, SASL/SCRAM, mTLS, plaintext, Kafka ACLs

Encryption, Private/Public access, Authentication & Authorization - IAM, SASL/SCRAM, mTLS, plaintext, Kafka ACLs
Monitoring

CloudWatch, Open Monitoring

CloudWatch, Open Monitoring
Note

You can't change an MSK Provisioned cluster from a Standard broker type to an Express broker type by switching the broker type using the MSK API. You have to create a new cluster with the desired broker type (Standard or Express).

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