Apache Kafka Quick Start

Learn how to download, install, and start Apache Kafka® locally using Confluent’s enterprise components, or run Kafka in cloud using Confluent Cloud.

Quick start Kafka in cloud (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)

This quick start guide 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.

Quick start Kafka on your machine

The quick start guides in this section show you how to get up and running with Confluent Platform and its main components on your local machine. These quick start guides demonstrate both the basic and most powerful capabilities of Confluent Platform, including using Control Center for topic management and using ksqlDB for event stream processing.

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: