Welcome to the Amazon MSK Developer Guide
Welcome to the Amazon MSK Developer Guide. The following topics can help you get started using this guide, based on what you're trying to do.
-
Create an Amazon MSK cluster by following the Getting started using Amazon MSK tutorial.
-
Dive deeper into the functionality of Amazon MSK in Amazon MSK: How it works Amazon MSK multi-VPC private connectivity in a single Region.
-
Run Apache Kafka without having to manage and scale cluster capacity with MSK Serverless.
For highlights, product details, and pricing, see the service page for Amazon MSK
What is Amazon MSK?
Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is a fully managed service that enables you to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka to process streaming data. Amazon MSK provides the control-plane operations, such as those for creating, updating, and deleting clusters. It lets you use Apache Kafka data-plane operations, such as those for producing and consuming data. It runs open-source versions of Apache Kafka. This means existing applications, tooling, and plugins from partners and the Apache Kafka community are supported without requiring changes to application code. You can use Amazon MSK to create clusters that use any of the Apache Kafka versions listed under Supported Apache Kafka versions.
The following diagram provides an overview of how Amazon MSK works.

The diagram demonstrates the interaction between the following components:
-
Broker nodes — When creating an Amazon MSK cluster, you specify how many broker nodes you want Amazon MSK to create in each Availability Zone. In the example cluster shown in this diagram, there's one broker per Availability Zone. Each Availability Zone has its own virtual private cloud (VPC) subnet.
ZooKeeper nodes — Amazon MSK also creates the Apache ZooKeeper nodes for you. Apache ZooKeeper is an open-source server that enables highly reliable distributed coordination.
Producers, consumers, and topic creators — Amazon MSK lets you use Apache Kafka data-plane operations to create topics and to produce and consume data.
Cluster Operations You can use the Amazon Web Services Management Console, the Amazon Command Line Interface (Amazon CLI), or the APIs in the SDK to perform control-plane operations. For example, you can create or delete an Amazon MSK cluster, list all the clusters in an account, view the properties of a cluster, and update the number and type of brokers in a cluster.
Amazon MSK detects and automatically recovers from the most common failure scenarios for clusters so that your producer and consumer applications can continue their write and read operations with minimal impact. When Amazon MSK detects a broker failure, it mitigates the failure or replaces the unhealthy or unreachable broker with a new one. In addition, where possible, it reuses the storage from the older broker to reduce the data that Apache Kafka needs to replicate. Your availability impact is limited to the time required for Amazon MSK to complete the detection and recovery. After a recovery, your producer and consumer apps can continue to communicate with the same broker IP addresses that they used before the failure.