Amazon MSK is a fully managed service that makes it easy for you to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka to process streaming data. Apache Kafka is an open-source platform for building real-time streaming data pipelines and applications. With Amazon MSK, you can use native Apache Kafka APIs to populate data lakes, stream changes to and from databases, and power machine learning and analytics applications.

Apache Kafka clusters are challenging to setup, scale, and manage in production. When you run Apache Kafka on your own, you need to provision servers, configure Apache Kafka manually, replace servers when they fail, orchestrate server patches and upgrades, architect the cluster for high availability, ensure data is durably stored and secured, setup monitoring and alarms, and carefully plan scaling events to support load changes. Amazon MSK makes it easy for you to build and run production applications on Apache Kafka without needing Apache Kafka infrastructure management expertise. That means you spend less time managing infrastructure and more time building applications.

With a few clicks in the Amazon MSK console you can create highly available Apache Kafka clusters with settings and configuration based on Apache Kafka’s deployment best practices. Amazon MSK automatically provisions and runs your Apache Kafka clusters. Amazon MSK continuously monitors cluster health and automatically replaces unhealthy nodes with no downtime to your application. In addition, Amazon MSK secures your Apache Kafka cluster by encrypting data at rest.