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Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)

This guide goes through the required steps to connect Materialize to an Amazon MSK cluster, including some of the more complicated bits around configuring security settings in Amazon MSK.

If you already have an Amazon MSK cluster, you can skip step 1 and directly move on to Make the cluster public and enable SASL. You can also skip steps 3 and 4 if you already have Apache Kafka installed and running, and have created a topic that you want to create a source for.

The process to connect Materialize to Amazon MSK consists of the following steps:

  1. Create an Amazon MSK cluster

    If you already have an Amazon MSK cluster set up, then you can skip this step.

    a. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon MSK console

    b. Choose Create cluster

    c. Enter a cluster name, and leave all other settings unchanged

    d. From the table under All cluster settings, copy the values of the following settings and save them because you need them later in this tutorial: VPC, Subnets, Security groups associated with VPC

    e. Choose Create cluster

    Note: This creation can take about 15 minutes.

  2. Make the cluster public and enable SASL

    Turn on SASL

    a. Navigate to the Amazon MSK console

    b. Choose the MSK cluster you just created in Step 1

    c. Click on the Properties tab

    d. In the Security settings section, choose Edit

    e. Check the checkbox next to SASL/SCRAM authentication

    f. Click Save changes

    You can find more details about updating a cluster’s security configurations here.

    Create a symmetric key

    a. Now go to the AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) console

    b. Click Create Key

    c. Choose Symmetric and click Next

    d. Give the key and Alias and click Next

    e. Under Administrative permissions, check the checkbox next to the AWSServiceRoleForKafka and click Next

    f. Under Key usage permissions, again check the checkbox next to the AWSServiceRoleForKafka and click Next

    g. Click on Create secret

    h. Review the details and click Finish

    You can find more details about creating a symmetric key here.

    Store a new Secret

    a. Go to the AWS Secrets Manager console

    b. Click Store a new secret

    c. Choose Other type of secret (e.g. API key) for the secret type

    d. Under Key/value pairs click on Plaintext

    e. Paste the following in the space below it and replace <your-username> and <your-password> with the username and password you want to set for the cluster

      {
    "username": "<your-username>",
    "password": "<your-password>"
  }

    f. On the next page, give a Secret name that starts with AmazonMSK_

    g. Under Encryption Key, select the symmetric key you just created in the previous sub-section from the dropdown

    h. Go forward to the next steps and finish creating the secret. Once created, record the ARN (Amazon Resource Name) value for your secret

    You can find more details about creating a secret using AWS Secrets Manager here.

    Associate secret with MSK cluster

    a. Navigate back to the Amazon MSK console and click on the cluster you created in Step 1

    b. Click on the Properties tab

    c. In the Security settings section, under SASL/SCRAM authentication, click on Associate secrets

    d. Paste the ARN you recorded in the previous subsection and click Associate secrets

    Create the cluster’s configuration

    a. Go to the Amazon CloudShell console

    b. Create a file (eg. msk-config.txt) with the following line

      allow.everyone.if.no.acl.found = false

    c. Run the following AWS CLI command, replacing <config-file-path> with the path to the file where you saved your configuration in the previous step

      aws kafka create-configuration --name "MakePublic" \
  --description "Set allow.everyone.if.no.acl.found = false" \
  --kafka-versions "2.6.2" \
  --server-properties fileb://<config-file-path>/msk-config.txt

    You can find more information about making your cluster public here.

  3. Create a client machine

    If you already have a client machine set up that can interact with your cluster, then you can skip this step.

    If not, you can create an EC2 client machine and then add the security group of the client to the inbound rules of the cluster’s security group from the VPC console. You can find more details about how to do that here.

  4. Install Apache Kafka and create a topic

    To start using Materialize with Apache Kafka, you need to create a Materialize source over an Apache Kafka topic. If you already have Apache Kafka installed and a topic created, you can skip this step.

    Otherwise, you can install Apache Kafka on your client machine from the previous step and create a topic. You can find more information about how to do that here.

  5. Create ACLs

    As allow.everyone.if.no.acl.found is set to false, you must create ACLs for the cluster and topics configured in the previous step to set appropriate access permissions. For more information, see the Amazon MSK documentation.

  6. Create a source in Materialize

    a. Open the Amazon MSK console and select your cluster

    b. Click on View client information

    c. Copy the url under Private endpoint and against SASL/SCRAM. This will be your <broker-url> going forward.

    d. From a psql terminal, connect to Materialize.

    e. Create a source using the command below. Replace <source-name> with whatever you want to name your source. The broker url is what you copied in step c of this subsection. The <topic-name> is the name of the topic you created in Step 4. The <your-username> and <your-password> is from Store a new secret under Step 2.

    CREATE SECRET msk_password AS '<your-password>';

CREATE CONNECTION kafka_connection TO KAFKA (
    BROKER '<broker-url>',
    SASL MECHANISMS = 'SCRAM-SHA-512',
    SASL USERNAME = '<your-username>',
    SASL PASSWORD = SECRET msk_password
  );

CREATE SOURCE <source-name>
  FROM KAFKA CONNECTION kafka_connection (TOPIC '<topic-name>')
  FORMAT text
  WITH (SIZE = '3xsmall');

    f. If the command executes without an error and outputs CREATE SOURCE, it means that you have successfully connected Materialize to your cluster.

    Note: The example above walked through creating a source which is a way of connecting Materialize to an external data source. We created a connection to Amazon MSK using SASL authentication, using credentials securely stored as secrets in Materialize’s secret management system. For input formats, we used text, however, Materialize supports various other options as well. For example, you can ingest messages formatted in JSON, Avro and Protobuf. You can find more details about the various different supported formats and possible configurations here.

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