Kafka Migration to Amazon MSK | Stratus10

Kafka often becomes critical infrastructure before anyone plans for it. Teams on a third-party hosted service pay for oversized clusters, lose visibility into performance, and incur data transfer charges on every message between services. Teams running Kafka themselves carry the patching, scaling, and recovery work that pulls engineering time away from product development.

Stratus10 migrates your Kafka workloads to Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) inside your own AWS environment. You keep full control of cluster configuration, scaling, and message serialization, while AWS manages the underlying brokers. The cluster is defined in AWS CloudFormation so environments can be rebuilt, replicated, and recovered on demand.

Our engagement follows a structured process designed to minimize disruption to your dependent services:

1. Discovery and assessment: We review your current Kafka topology, topics, throughput, retention policies, producers, consumers, and current costs to establish a clear baseline.
2. Target architecture: We design the MSK cluster, networking (VPC endpoints, security groups), authentication, encryption, and broker sizing matched to your actual workload.
3. Infrastructure as code: We build the MSK environment with CloudFormation templates for each environment--dev, staging, and production--so every deployment is consistent and repeatable.
4. Migration and cutover: We plan and execute topic and data migration with a cutover approach that minimizes disruption, including documented rollback steps.
5. Monitoring and alerting: We configure Amazon CloudWatch metrics, dashboards, and alerts so your team has full visibility into cluster health, topic sizes, and scaling events.
6. Handoff: We deliver operations documentation and conduct a working session with your team on operating and scaling the cluster going forward.

Key benefits of migrating Kafka to Amazon MSK with Stratus10:

• Lower hosting cost: Right-sized brokers and cluster capacity matched to actual throughput instead of overprovisioned capacity.
• No egress fees between services: Private connectivity through VPC endpoints keeps service-to-service traffic inside your network and off your data transfer bill.
• Full visibility: CloudWatch dashboards for cluster health, topic sizes, and scaling events, plus proactive alerts for issues that need attention.
• Control and repeatability: Infrastructure as code enables consistent environments and faster disaster recovery.
• Less operational overhead: AWS manages broker infrastructure while your team retains control of configuration and tuning.

Deliverables include a current-state assessment and target MSK architecture diagram, CloudFormation templates for the MSK environment, a migration and cutover runbook with rollback steps, CloudWatch dashboards and alert configuration, and operations documentation with a team training session.

Success story: For Peachjar, a K-12 edtech SaaS platform with 60+ microservices exchanging hundreds of thousands of messages per day, migrating to MSK cut Kafka hosting costs by more than 20% and eliminated data egress charges between services.