Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)
- What it is
- Fully managed Apache Kafka. AWS provisions, patches, and monitors the brokers and ZooKeeper/KRaft layer; you use standard Kafka APIs and tooling.
- Why choose it over Kinesis
- You already run Kafka and want zero application changes — open-source compatibility and portability.
- Need the Kafka ecosystem: Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, Schema Registry, existing consumer groups.
- Longer or unlimited retention and very high partition counts.
- MSK Serverless
- Removes broker sizing entirely; scales capacity automatically and bills per usage.
- Trade-off
- More operational concepts to understand (topics, partitions, consumer groups, replication factor) than Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, which is simpler and AWS-native.
- Exam signal
- “Existing Kafka workload”, “open-source compatibility”, “migrate Kafka to AWS” → MSK.