Private Networking for Lightning Tables in Confluent Cloud
If you access a Lightning Table over a private network, query it through an HTTP API or with a Model Context Protocol (MCP) client. You can’t run queries in the Confluent Cloud Console over a private network. To connect, use the associated private endpoint for the API or the Real-Time Context Engine MCP endpoint instead of the public endpoint.
Important
Lightning Tables are rolling out to Confluent Cloud accounts in phases. If you don’t see this feature, it’s not available for your account at this time.
Private networking for the API
You can query a Lightning Table through the API by using the following private networking options on AWS:
Private Network Interface (PNI)
Multi-environment PrivateLink Attachment through an ingress PrivateLink Gateway
The original PrivateLink Attachment, which the ingress PrivateLink Gateway replaced
For more information about these options, see Use Private Network Interface on Confluent Cloud and Use AWS PrivateLink for Serverless Products on Confluent Cloud.
The following table shows the private API endpoint for each networking option.
Networking option |
Endpoint |
|---|---|
PNI |
|
Ingress PrivateLink Gateway |
|
Original PrivateLink Attachment |
|
Replace the following placeholders:
<access_point_id>: The ID of your access point, without the hyphen. The Cloud Console shows the access point ID on the networking page for your environment. For example, if the access point ID isap-abc123xyz, useapabc123xyz.<region>: The AWS region of your cluster, for exampleus-west-2.
For example, for an access point with the ID ap-abc123xyz in the
us-west-2 region, the endpoint is
sql-apabc123xyz.us-west-2.aws.accesspoint.glb.confluent.cloud.
Private networking for MCP
An MCP client queries a Lightning Table through the Real-Time Context Engine. For the private networking options and endpoints that MCP supports, see Private Networking for the Real-Time Context Engine in Confluent Cloud.
Warning
Cross-environment and cross-network access
Review your private network topology and environment isolation model before you use MCP over a private network. With private networking enabled, Lightning Tables that you query with MCP might be accessible across environments and private network boundaries within your organization.