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Expand a Dedicated Kafka Cluster in Confluent Cloud

This topic shows you how to expand an existing Dedicated Apache Kafka® cluster. Increasing the number of CKUs for your cluster enables you to seamlessly scale your cluster to meet your streaming needs. To help you decide whether to expand your cluster, see Cluster Load Metric for Dedicated Clusters in Confluent Cloud and Interpret a high cluster load value.

When you scale a Dedicated Kafka cluster, Confluent adds brokers and rebalances the cluster to help ensure a balanced load across the brokers.

Prerequisites:

  1. Select your Confluent Cloud cluster.

    Confluent Cluster panel

  2. Click the Cluster Settings, the Capacity tab and on the Adjustable limits pane, select Adjust capacity.

    Confluent Cluster capacity

  3. View the current usage on your cluster and determine if you are hitting any usage limits. Use the slider to increase the number of CKUs for the cluster. You will see a preview of the reduced capacity before it is applied. If you are satisfied with the changes, click Apply changes.

    Expand Confluent Cluster capacity

  4. Confirm your changes and click Continue. For details on how to shrink a cluster, see Shrink a Dedicated Kafka Cluster in Confluent Cloud.

    Confirm cluster expansion

See Dedicated cluster provisioning and resizing time for guidance on how long expansion may take and variables that affect that timing.