# Usage of Kafka Rest Proxy

**URL:** <https://forum.confluent.io/t/usage-of-kafka-rest-proxy/6105>\
**Category:** Kafka Connect\
**Created:** [22 September 2022 11:00 UTC](https://forum.confluent.io/t/usage-of-kafka-rest-proxy/6105 "2022-09-22T11:00:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![nina.gelderbloem](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/dec6dc/32.png) [@nina.gelderbloem](https://forum.confluent.io/u/nina.gelderbloem)\
**Post date:** [22 September 2022 11:00 UTC](https://forum.confluent.io/t/usage-of-kafka-rest-proxy/6105/1 "2022-09-22T11:00:16Z")

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Hello,  
Our site is very new to Kafka. We received advise not to make use of the Kafka Rest Proxy, but rather to use the Kafka Clients ie Java. WHich is fine, but we sit with lot of legacy systems, where it would be lot easier just to use the KAFKA Rest Proxy.

I’m curious if any of you had bad experiences with the Rest Proxy, and would advise us to stay away from it?  
We’re a university, so the traffic is not going to be a match for traffic thru Netflix or other sites.

Thanks

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**Author:** ![OneCricketeer](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.confluent.io/onecricketeer/32/1551_2.png) [@OneCricketeer](https://forum.confluent.io/u/OneCricketeer)\
**Post date:** [4 October 2022 23:01 UTC](https://forum.confluent.io/t/usage-of-kafka-rest-proxy/6105/2 "2022-10-04T23:01:19Z")

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From a performance perspective, adding native TCP Kafka clients would indeed be better than HTTP based services.

You don’t need to use the REST Proxy, either. You could write your own purpose specific HTTP services that your legacy services would hit. Either way, you’ll need to add some new dependencies to those systems.

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**Author:** ![bhoomireddy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/90ced4/32.png) [@bhoomireddy](https://forum.confluent.io/u/bhoomireddy)\
**Post date:** [11 October 2022 22:59 UTC](https://forum.confluent.io/t/usage-of-kafka-rest-proxy/6105/3 "2022-10-11T22:59:31Z")

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The above response from @OneCricketeer is spot-on. REST Proxy service is not mandatory in your case. If you cannot leverage Kafka client libraries and build applications using them, then you can either go with REST Proxy or build your own HTTP service (for example using Spring framework)

From experience, a REST Proxy might work for your university workloads, but would not be able to support a high throughput scenario. In such cases, multiple REST Proxies need to be deployed with a front-end load balancer to spread the load across all the REST Proxies.

Hope that helps!

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/uploads/confluentcommunity/original/1X/c49438c90c9df282e9996fdf6971be890c71b65a.svg) [@system](https://forum.confluent.io/u/system)\
**Post date:** [10 November 2022 23:00 UTC](https://forum.confluent.io/t/usage-of-kafka-rest-proxy/6105/4 "2022-11-10T23:00:23Z")

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