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I want to use Kafka as a message broker on the server side of a distributed application. We have clients that can be located around the world, and that send frequent messages to the server. Right now those messages are just JSON over ZMQ. I am considering changing the connection between client and server to Kafka (since I'm going to use Kafka in the server side anyway) but have the following confusion:

  • Is Kafka even meant to be used this way (distributed clients connecting to the server with it)? I don't see that in the docs.

  • If I don't use Kafka, I'll have a single choke point at my server/DC entry. What's the efficient alternative to get information from the software gateway (which is now ZMQ) into kafka, without having that software gateway be a bottleneck?

Ken - Enough about Monica
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Kafka doesn't care how you use it; it does nothing except transporting your arbitrary messages for you. Yes, you can use it that way, and actually I do not see anything specific enough about it to make it necessary to be mentioned in the docs.

Obviously you need to take a little care regarding security (SSL or SASL...) but aside from that, there should be no particular problem.

AnoE
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