Important

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Apache Kafka Quick Start

Learn how to download, install, and start Apache Kafka® locally using Confluent’s enterprise components, or run Kafka in any cloud using Confluent Cloud. You can set up your Kafka environment in just minutes.

Start Kafka in any cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP)

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

Click here to get started with Confluent Cloud.

Install Kafka on your machine

This quick start shows you how to get up and running with Confluent Platform and its main components. This quick start demonstrates both the basic and most powerful capabilities of Confluent Platform, including using Control Center for topic management and event stream processing using ksqlDB. In this quick start, you create Kafka topics, use Kafka Connect to generate mock data to those topics, and create ksqlDB streaming queries on those topics. You then go to Control Center 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 production deployment recommendations.

Choose your deployment method: