The Confluent REST Proxy

The Confluent REST Proxy provides a RESTful interface to a Apache Kafka® cluster, making it easy to produce and consume messages, view the state of the cluster, and perform administrative actions without using the native Kafka protocol or clients.

Some example use cases are:

  • Reporting data to Kafka from any frontend app built in any language not supported by official Confluent clients
  • Ingesting messages into a stream processing framework that doesn’t yet support Kafka
  • Scripting administrative actions

There is a plugin available for Confluent REST Proxy that helps authenticate incoming requests and propagates the authenticated principal to requests to Kafka. This enables Confluent REST Proxy clients to utilize the multi-tenant security features of the Kafka broker. For more information, see Confluent Security Plugins.