Constructing serverless occasion streaming purposes with Amazon MSK and AWS Lambda

As organizations construct trendy purposes with event-driven architectures (EDA), they usually search options that decrease infrastructure administration overhead whereas maximizing developer productiveness. Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) and AWS Lambda collectively present a serverless, scalable, and cost-efficient platform for real-time event-driven processing.

On this put up, we describe how one can simplify your event-driven software structure utilizing AWS Lambda with Amazon MSK. We show how one can configure Lambda as a shopper for Kafka subjects, together with a cross-account setup and how one can optimize value and efficiency for these purposes.

Why use Lambda with Amazon MSK?

Clients constructing event-driven purposes have a number of key priorities relating to their structure decisions. They usually search to cut back their operational overhead by utilizing Amazon Internet Providers (AWS) to deal with the complicated, underlying infrastructure parts so their groups can deal with core enterprise logic. Moreover, builders favor a streamlined expertise that minimizes the necessity for repetitive boilerplate code, enabling them to be extra productive and deal with creating worth. Moreover, these prospects need to obtain each scalability and cost-effectiveness with out the burden of managing compute infrastructure immediately. Lambda integration with Amazon MSK successfully addresses these necessities, delivering a complete answer that mixes the advantages of serverless computing with managed Kafka companies. For instance, an ecommerce firm can use Amazon MSK to gather real-time clickstream knowledge from its web site and course of these occasions utilizing AWS Lambda. With this integration, they will set off Lambda capabilities to replace suggestion fashions, ship customized presents, or analyze person habits immediately—with out provisioning or managing servers. The important thing advantages of utilizing Lambda with Amazon MSK embrace:

1. Simplicity by means of native integration – AWS Lambda presents native integration with Amazon MSK by means of a connector useful resource known as occasion supply mapping. You should utilize this integration to immediately affiliate a Kafka subject—whether or not it’s on Amazon MSK or a self-managed Kafka cluster—as an occasion supply for a Lambda operate with out writing customized shopper logic. With only a few configuration steps, occasion supply mapping handles partition project, offset monitoring, and parallelized batch processing below the hood. It makes use of the Kafka shopper group protocol to distribute subject partitions throughout a number of concurrent Lambda invocations, helps batch windowing, and allows at-least-once supply semantics. Furthermore, it routinely commits offsets upon profitable operate execution whereas dealing with retries and dead-letter queue (DLQ) routing for failed data, considerably lowering the operational overhead historically related to Kafka customers.
2. Auto scaling and throughput controls – When utilizing AWS Lambda with Amazon MSK by means of occasion supply mapping, Lambda routinely scales by assigning a devoted occasion poller per Kafka partition, enabling parallel, partition-based processing. This enables the system to elastically deal with various site visitors with out guide intervention. For superior management, provisioned concurrency pre-initializes Lambda execution environments, eliminating chilly begins and delivering constant low-latency efficiency. Moreover, with provisioned occasion supply mapping, you possibly can configure the minimal and most variety of Kafka pollers, offering exact management over throughput and concurrency. That is preferrred for purposes with unpredictable site visitors patterns or strict latency necessities.
3. Price-effectiveness – AWS Lambda makes use of a pay-per-use mannequin wherein you solely pay for compute time and variety of invocations. When built-in with Amazon MSK, there aren’t any expenses for idle time, making it preferrred for bursty or low-frequency Kafka workloads. You’ll be able to additional optimize prices by tuning batch dimension and batch window settings. For mission-critical workloads, provisioned concurrency supplies constant efficiency with managed pricing.
4. Occasion filtering – AWS Lambda helps occasion filtering for Amazon MSK occasion sources, which suggests you possibly can course of solely the Kafka data that match particular standards. This reduces pointless operate invocations and optimizes your operate prices. You’ll be able to outline as much as 5 filters per occasion supply mapping (with the choice to request a rise to 10). Every filter makes use of a JSON-based sample to specify the circumstances a file should meet to be processed. Filters will be utilized utilizing the AWS Administration Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or AWS Serverless Software Mannequin (AWS SAM) templates. For extra particulars and examples, discuss with the AWS Lambda documentation on occasion filtering with Amazon MSK.
5. Dealing with Availability Zone outage on your shopper – Amazon MSK allows excessive availability on your Kafka brokers by distributing them throughout a number of Availability Zones inside a Area. To keep up excessive availability throughout your software, you equally want a shopper that provides excessive availability. AWS Lambda presents excessive availability and resilience by working your shopper capabilities throughout a number of Availability Zones in a Area. Which means that even when one Availability Zone experiences an outage, your Lambda operate will proceed to function in different wholesome Availability Zones. Whereas Lambda manages safety patching and Availability Zone failure situations, you possibly can focus in your software logic.
6. Cross-account occasion processing – Cross-account connectivity between AWS Lambda and Amazon MSK permits a Lambda operate in a single AWS account to devour knowledge from an MSK cluster in one other account utilizing MSK multi-VPC non-public connectivity powered by AWS PrivateLink. This setup is especially useful for organizations that centralize Kafka infrastructure whereas sustaining separate accounts for various purposes or groups.
7. Help for JSON, Avro, Protobuf, and Schema Registries – AWS Lambda helps Kafka occasions in JSON, Avro and Protobuf codecs through occasion supply mapping. It integrates with AWS Glue Schema registry, Confluent Cloud Schema registry, and self-managed Confluent Schema registry , enabling native schema validation, filtering, and deserialization with out customized code.

How Lambda processes messages out of your Kafka subject

Lambda makes use of occasion supply mappings to course of data from Amazon MSK by actively polling Kafka subjects by means of occasion pollers that invoke Lambda capabilities with batches of data. These mappings are Lambda managed assets designed for high-throughput, stream-based processing. By default, Lambda detects the OffsetLag for all partitions in your Kafka subject and routinely scales pollers based mostly on site visitors. For top-throughput purposes, you possibly can allow provisioned mode to outline minimal and most pollers, and your occasion supply mapping auto scales between the minimal and most outlined values. Within the provisioned mode, every poller can course of as much as 5 MBps and helps concurrent Lambda invocations.

After Lambda processes every batch, it commits the offsets of the messages in that batch. In case your operate returns an error for a message in a batch, Lambda retries the entire batch of messages till processing succeeds or the messages expire. You’ll be able to ship data that fail all retry makes an attempt to an on-failure vacation spot for later processing. To keep up ordered processing inside a partition, Lambda limits the utmost occasion pollers to the variety of partitions within the subject. When establishing Kafka as a Lambda occasion supply, you possibly can specify a shopper group ID to let Lambda be a part of an present Kafka shopper group. If different customers are lively in that group, Lambda will obtain solely a part of the subject’s messages. If the group exists, Lambda begins from the group’s dedicated offset, ignoring the StartingPosition. The next diagram illustrates this move.

Walkthrough: Construct a serverless Kafka app with AWS Lambda

Comply with these steps to construct a serverless software that consumes messages from an MSK cluster utilizing AWS Lambda:

1. Create an Amazon MSK cluster. Use the AWS Administration Console or AWS CLI to create your MSK cluster. When the cluster is up, create your Kafka subject(s). For detailed directions, discuss with the Amazon MSK documentation.
2. Create a Lambda operate utilizing the AWS Administration Console or the AWS CLI. To study extra about making a Lambda operate, discuss with Create your first Lambda operate. The Lambda operate’s execution position must have the next permissions:
   1. Entry to hook up with your MSK cluster
   2. Permissions to handle elastic community interfaces in your VPC
3. To attach Lambda to Amazon MSK as a shopper, arrange occasion supply mapping to hyperlink your MSK subject with the Lambda operate. This enables Lambda to routinely ballot for brand new messages and course of them. Comply with the information on how one can configure occasion supply mapping.

For reference, configuring occasion supply mapping includes three steps:

4. Community setup – Within the default occasion supply mapping mode, it is advisable to configure a networking setup utilizing a PrivateLink endpoint or NAT gateway for occasion supply mapping to invoke Lambda capabilities. In provisioned mode, no networking configuration is required (and also you don’t incur the price of networking parts).
5. Occasion supply mapping parameter configuration – This includes setting essential configuration parameters for the occasion supply mapping to have the ability to ballot messages out of your Kafka cluster. This consists of the MSK cluster, subject identify, shopper group ID, authentication methodology, and optionally, schema registry, scaling mode. You’ll be able to configure the scaling mode for provisioned throughput, together with batch dimension, batch window, and occasion filtering on your occasion supply mapping.
6. Entry permissions – This includes configuring required permissions to entry the required AWS assets, and consists of configuring permissions for the operate to execute the code, permissions for the occasion supply mapping to entry your MSK cluster, and permissions for Lambda to entry your VPC assets.

The next screenshot exhibits the console setup for configuring Amazon MSK occasion supply mapping, together with the Amazon MSK set off associated fields.

The next screenshot exhibits occasion poller configuration.

The next screenshot exhibits extra settings you should use, relying in your use case.

Optimizing AWS Lambda for stream processing with Amazon MSK

When constructing real-time knowledge processing pipelines with Amazon MSK and AWS Lambda, it’s vital to tune your setup for each efficiency and cost-efficiency. Lambda presents highly effective serverless compute capabilities, however to get essentially the most out of it in a streaming context, it is advisable to make just a few key optimizations:

1. Allow provisioned concurrency for low-latency processing – For workloads which can be delicate to latency—chilly begins can introduce undesirable delays. By enabling provisioned concurrency, you possibly can pre-warm a specified variety of Lambda situations in order that they’re at all times able to deal with site visitors instantly. This eliminates chilly begins and supplies constant response instances, which is essential for latency-critical use circumstances.
2. Allow provisioned mode for occasion supply mapping for high-throughput processing – For Kafka workloads with stringent throughput necessities, activate the provisioned mode. The optimum configuration of minimal and most occasion pollers on your Kafka occasion supply mapping is determined by your software’s efficiency necessities. Begin with the default minimal occasion pollers to baseline the efficiency profile and regulate occasion pollers based mostly on noticed message processing patterns and your software’s efficiency necessities. For workloads with spiky site visitors and strict efficiency wants, improve the minimal occasion pollers to deal with sudden surges. You’ll be able to fine-tune the minimal occasion pollers by evaluating your required throughput, your noticed throughput, which is determined by components such because the ingested messages per second and common payload dimension, and utilizing the throughput capability of 1 occasion poller (as much as 5 MB/s) as reference. To keep up ordered processing inside a partition, Lambda caps the utmost occasion pollers on the variety of partitions within the subject.
3. Optimize message batching utilizing dimension and windowing – By integrating Lambda with Amazon MSK, you possibly can management how messages are batched earlier than they’re despatched to your operate. Tuning parameters resembling batch dimension (the variety of data per invocation: 1–10,000 data) and most batching window (how lengthy to attend for a full batch: 0–300 seconds) can considerably impression efficiency. Bigger batches imply fewer invocations, which reduces overhead and improves throughput. Nonetheless, it’s vital to strike a stability—too giant a batch or window would possibly introduce undesirable processing delays. Monitor your stream’s habits and regulate these settings based mostly on throughput necessities and acceptable latency.
4. Apply filters to cut back pointless invocations – Not each file in your Kafka subject would possibly require processing. To keep away from pointless Lambda invocations (and related prices), apply filtering logic immediately when configuring the occasion supply mapping. With Lambda, you possibly can outline filtering (as much as 10 filters) standards in order that solely related data set off your operate. This helps cut back compute time, decrease noise, and optimize your funds, particularly when coping with high-throughput subjects with blended content material. For Amazon MSK, Lambda commits offsets for matched and unmatched messages after efficiently invoking the operate.

Conclusion

By combining Amazon MSK with AWS Lambda, you possibly can seamlessly construct trendy, serverless event-driven purposes. This integration eliminates the necessity to handle shopper teams, compute infrastructure, or scaling logic so groups can deal with delivering enterprise worth quicker.

Whether or not you’re integrating Kafka into microservices, remodeling knowledge pipelines, or constructing reactive purposes, Lambda with Amazon MSK is a strong and versatile serverless answer. For detailed documentation on how one can configure Lambda with Amazon MSK, discuss with the AWS Lambda Developer Information. For extra serverless studying assets, go to Serverless Land.

Concerning the Authors

Tarun Rai Madan is a Principal Product Supervisor at Amazon Internet Providers (AWS). He focuses on serverless applied sciences and leads product technique to assist prospects obtain accelerated enterprise outcomes with event-driven purposes, utilizing companies like AWS Lambda, AWS Step Features, Apache Kafka, and Amazon SQS/SNS. Previous to AWS, he was an engineering chief within the semiconductor trade, and led improvement of high-performance processors for wi-fi, automotive, and knowledge middle purposes.

Masudur Rahaman Sayem is a Streaming Knowledge Architect at AWS with over 25 years of expertise within the IT trade. He collaborates with AWS prospects worldwide to architect and implement subtle knowledge streaming options that deal with complicated enterprise challenges. As an professional in distributed computing, Sayem focuses on designing large-scale distributed methods structure for max efficiency and scalability. He has a eager curiosity and keenness for distributed structure, which he applies to designing enterprise-grade options at web scale.