<p>Kafka doesn't care how you use it; it does nothing except transporting your arbitrary messages for you. Yes, you can use it that way, and actually I do not see anything specific enough about it to make it necessary to be mentioned in the docs.</p>

<p>Obviously you need to take a  little care regarding security (SSL or SASL...) but aside from that, there should be no particular problem.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-12-15T12:23:18.637Z
2018-12-15T12:23:18.637Z
AnoE
<p>I want to use Kafka as a message broker on the server side of a distributed application.  We have clients that can be located around the world, and that send frequent messages to the server.  Right now those messages are just JSON over ZMQ.  I am considering changing the connection between client and server to Kafka (since I'm going to use Kafka in the server side anyway) but have the following confusion:</p>

<ul>
<li><p>Is Kafka even meant to be used this way (distributed clients connecting to the server with it)?  I don't see that in the docs.</p></li>
<li><p>If I don't use Kafka, I'll have a single choke point at my server/DC entry.  What's the efficient alternative to get information from the software gateway (which is now ZMQ) into kafka, without having that software gateway be a bottleneck?</p></li>
</ul>

<kafka>
Kafka from client to server vs. "router" in the DC
Ken - Enough about Monica
# Kafka from client to server vs. "router" in the DC

(Asked by: username_0 on 2018-12-14)

I want to use Kafka as a message broker on the server side of a distributed application. We have clients that can be located around the world, and that send frequent messages to the server. Right now those messages are just JSON over ZMQ. I am considering changing the connection between client and server to Kafka (since I'm going to use Kafka in the server side anyway) but have the following confusion:

* Is Kafka even meant to be used this way (distributed clients connecting to the server with it)? I don't see that in the docs.
* If I don't use Kafka, I'll have a single choke point at my server/DC entry. What's the efficient alternative to get information from the software gateway (which is now ZMQ) into kafka, without having that software gateway be a bottleneck?

**Tags:** kafka


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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2018-12-15. Score: 1

Kafka doesn't care how you use it; it does nothing except transporting your arbitrary messages for you. Yes, you can use it that way, and actually I do not see anything specific enough about it to make it necessary to be mentioned in the docs.

Obviously you need to take a little care regarding security (SSL or SASL...) but aside from that, there should be no particular problem.


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