.. meta::
   :title: Kafka Quick Start Guides - Confluent Platform
   :description: Kafka Download & Installation Guides - Confluent Quickstart

.. _quickstart:

Apache Kafka Quick Start
========================

Learn how to download, install, and start |ak-tm| locally using Confluent's enterprise components, or
run |ak| in any cloud using |ccloud|. You can set up your |ak| environment in just minutes.

=============================================
Start |ak| in any cloud (|aws|, Azure, |gcp|)
=============================================

This quick start gets you up and running with |ccloud| using a basic cluster.
It shows how to use |ccloud| to create topics, produce and consume to an |ak-tm| cluster. The quick
start introduces both the web UI and the |ccloud| CLI to manage clusters and
topics in |ccloud|, as these can be used interchangeably for most tasks.

`Click here to get started with Confluent Cloud <https://docs.confluent.io/cloud/current/get-started/index.html>`__.

============================
Install |ak| on your machine
============================

This quick start shows you how to get up and running with |cp| and its main components. This
quick start demonstrates both the basic and most powerful capabilities of |cp|, including using
|c3-short| for topic management and event stream processing using |ksqldb|. In this quick start, you
create |ak| topics, use |kconnect-long| to generate mock data to those topics, and create |ksqldb|
streaming queries on those topics. You then go to |c3-short| to monitor and analyze the event
streaming queries.

.. important:: These self-managed quick starts provide a simple development environment, but are not meant for
               production. For production deployment information, see the
               :ref:`production deployment recommendations <cp-production-recommendations>`.

Choose your deployment method:

- :ref:`Docker <ce-docker-quickstart>`
- :ref:`Local <ce-quickstart>`


.. toctree::
    :maxdepth: 1
    :hidden:

    ce-quickstart
    ce-docker-quickstart
    cos-quickstart
    cos-docker-quickstart
    Confluent Cloud Quick Start <https://docs.confluent.io/cloud/current/get-started/index.html>