What's in this brief
01 What Conduktor changes Impact by role, measured results, and what AWS MSK delivers vs. what Conduktor adds 02 What Gateway adds Six capabilities enforced at the protocol level, no code changes 03 What Console adds Visibility, ownership, and cost attribution on top of AWS tooling 04 Built for AWS Native integrations across AWS IAM, KMS, S3, CloudWatch, ECS/EKS, and Marketplace
AWS MSK handles the infrastructure. It provisions, patches, and scales your Kafka brokers so your team doesn't have to. But the layer above the brokers, where encryption, governance, resilience, and multi-tenancy live, is still yours to build.
Conduktor is the enterprise data and control plane for Apache Kafka. It sits between your applications and your brokers and adds encryption, governance, and resilience at the protocol level. It's trusted by hundreds of organizations, including Fortune 500 financial institutions, airlines, and SaaS platforms.
Whether you're already running on AWS MSK or migrating to it, Conduktor Gateway is platform-agnostic, which reduces risk by giving you a consistent layer of control across mixed Kafka and cloud environments. This brief covers what changes when you add Conduktor to AWS MSK, the six Gateway capabilities that complement the brokers, how Console gives teams visibility and ownership, and the native AWS integrations that make it fit your existing infrastructure.
Conduktor Gateway intercepts all Kafka traffic at the protocol level. Applications connect the same way they always have, just to a different address. Nothing in your application code changes, but a great deal changes in what your platform can guarantee.
| For leadership | For platform teams | For development teams |
|---|
| Regulated workloads move to production instead of stalling in compliance reviews. | Encryption, access, and data quality are enforced once, not rebuilt per project. | Same Kafka clients, same code, same workflows, with no application changes. |
| Kafka investment scales across business units without unclear infrastructure growth. | DR failover becomes routine, not a crisis coordination exercise. | Isolated environments on demand, without waiting for dedicated infrastructure. |
| AWS MSK migrations accelerate without re-architecting applications. | Guardrails catch misconfigurations before they cause outages. | Bad data is rejected at the source before it cascades to downstream systems. |
Based on results reported by Conduktor customers running on AWS MSK.
| Result | What drives it |
|---|
| $500K+ first-year value | Consolidation, faster migration, and reduced operational overhead |
| 20–40% lower infrastructure cost | Virtual clusters and consolidation that eliminate cluster sprawl |
| Up to 95% faster recovery | Single-command failover instead of manual coordination across teams |
| 4,000+ virtual clusters | Running on standard infrastructure |
| What AWS MSK delivers | What Conduktor adds |
|---|
| Encryption at rest and in transit | Field-level encryption and tokenization inside messages |
| AWS IAM authentication and Kafka ACLs | Application-level access controls with per-consumer visibility |
| Single-region high availability | Multi-region failover in seconds, with no application changes |
| One cluster per environment | Virtual clusters for multi-tenancy on shared infrastructure |
| Cluster-level billing with tags | Per-topic and per-team cost attribution with self-service guardrails |
The short version
- AWS MSK handles infrastructure; Conduktor handles the enterprise layer. Brokers are managed for you. Encryption within messages, governance, resilience, and multi-tenancy are what Conduktor adds on top.
- Nothing changes in your applications. Clients connect to the same Kafka they always did, just through Conduktor, so adoption doesn't require a rewrite.
- The results are measurable. Customers report 20–40% lower infrastructure cost, up to 95% faster recovery, and $500K+ in first-year value.
Gateway speaks the Kafka protocol natively, sitting between your applications and AWS MSK brokers. It intercepts and governs traffic at the protocol level, so every capability below is enforced centrally with no application code changes.
1. Field-level data protection
AWS MSK encrypts data at rest and in transit. But any service with topic access reads the full payload, including PII and financial records.
Gateway adds field-level encryption, tokenization, and crypto shredding, with per-consumer decryption controls and native AWS KMS integration. Encrypt customer.ssn while customer.region stays readable, and one policy at the gateway replaces a custom crypto implementation in every project.
2. Real-time data quality
A single malformed message can crash consumers, break pipelines, and spread incorrect results before anyone notices.
Gateway adds protocol-level validation before messages enter AWS MSK, enforcing schema compliance and business rules with the ability to block, route, or flag bad data. Adoption is gradual: start by monitoring, then move to blocking, with no big-bang enforcement.
3. Client best practices
Kafka's native quotas cover throughput but can't enforce acknowledgments, compression, or commit frequency, which are the most dangerous misconfigurations at scale.
Gateway adds protocol-level guardrails that block unsafe configurations, detect connection and rebalance storms, and give operators immediate feedback.
4. Cross-network connectivity
AWS networking handles IP routing but doesn't understand Kafka's broker discovery protocol. Clients need every broker individually routable, which breaks across VPCs and accounts.
Gateway adds Kafka-protocol-aware routing that rewrites broker metadata, giving clients in any topology (hybrid cloud, multi-VPC, on-prem) access through a single entry point. For the full walkthrough, see Connect to AWS MSK Across VPCs Without Timeouts.
5. Disaster recovery and failover
AWS MSK Replicator syncs data across clusters, but switching hundreds of applications to a backup is the hard part, and most DR plans are never validated.
Gateway adds single-command failover that redirects all client traffic in seconds, plus built-in chaos testing via protocol-level fault injection to validate resilience without production risk.
6. Virtual clusters and infrastructure efficiency
Dedicating AWS MSK clusters per team and environment creates sprawl. Large messages and high-read scenarios add unnecessary broker load.
Gateway adds logically isolated virtual clusters with independent namespaces and access controls, plus S3 payload offloading and caching for broker efficiency.
Key points
- One enforcement point, six capabilities. Data protection, data quality, client guardrails, connectivity, DR, and multi-tenancy are all enforced at the gateway rather than rebuilt per application.
- No code changes. Every capability is applied at the protocol level, so applications connect exactly as they do to AWS MSK today.
- AWS MSK stays untouched. Fault injection, routing, and encryption happen in the proxy layer, not on your brokers.
If Gateway governs traffic, Console gives your teams the visibility and ownership to operate Kafka at scale without bottlenecking on the platform team.
| Capability | What it does |
|---|
| Unified operations | Manage topics, schemas, connectors, and consumer groups across all AWS MSK clusters from one interface. Works alongside the AWS Console and CLI. |
| Federated ownership | Developers discover, provision, and own resources within automated guardrails, catalogs, and approval workflows. Adds Kafka-level ownership on top of AWS IAM. |
| Visibility and troubleshooting | Browse and tail messages in production, monitor consumer lag, and route alerts to Slack, Teams, or PagerDuty. Adds application-level visibility alongside CloudWatch. |
| Cost attribution and insights | Track per-team Kafka usage for chargeback and surface health and risk recommendations across clusters. Complements AWS Cost Explorer with per-team breakdowns. |
Conduktor integrates natively with AWS services for authentication, encryption, storage, and deployment, so it fits into your existing infrastructure without additional tooling.
| Integration | What it provides |
|---|
| AWS MSK IAM authentication | Native support for the AWS_MSK_IAM SASL mechanism. Gateway inherits AWS IAM roles from ECS, EKS, and EC2. |
| AWS KMS | Field-level encryption keys managed in KMS. AWS IAM policies control which consumers decrypt which fields, and CloudTrail logs every operation. |
| Amazon S3 | Large payload offloading via the claim-check pattern. Payloads never consume broker storage or network bandwidth. |
| ECS / EKS deployment | Deploy Gateway as ECS tasks or EKS pods within your VPC, using native container orchestration. |
| AWS Glue Schema Registry | Native support for validation and evolution across Avro, JSON, and Protobuf. |
| AWS Marketplace | Available for simplified procurement, streamlining vendor onboarding and purchasing against existing agreements. |
See how Conduktor complements your AWS MSK investment
Book a technical demo tailored to your environment and use cases. We'll walk through the capabilities that map to your workloads and show what changes when you add Conduktor to AWS MSK.
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