Kafka in a DMZ: Protecting AWS MSK with Kong Event Gateway
Running Apache Kafka on Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) gives you a managed broker with no ZooKeeper to operate, automated patching, and multi-AZ replication handled by the service. What it doesn't give you is a safe, governed way to expose Kafka access beyond your VPC boundary. That problem looks simple on the surface. It isn't. And how you solve it has significant implications for security posture, operational complexity, and monthly cost.