Constructing serverless occasion streaming purposes with Amazon MSK and AWS Lambda

As organizations construct fashionable purposes with event-driven architectures (EDA), they typically search options that reduce 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 utility structure utilizing AWS Lambda with Amazon MSK. We display easy methods to configure Lambda as a shopper for Kafka matters, together with a cross-account setup and easy methods to optimize worth and efficiency for these purposes.

Why use Lambda with Amazon MSK?

Clients constructing event-driven purposes have a number of key priorities in the case of their structure decisions. They usually search to cut back their operational overhead by utilizing Amazon Internet Companies (AWS) to deal with the complicated, underlying infrastructure parts so their groups can concentrate on core enterprise logic. Moreover, builders favor a streamlined expertise that minimizes the necessity for repetitive boilerplate code, enabling them to be extra productive and concentrate on creating worth. Moreover, these prospects wish to obtain each scalability and cost-effectiveness with out the burden of managing compute infrastructure straight. 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 advice fashions, ship personalised provides, or analyze person habits immediately—with out provisioning or managing servers. The important thing advantages of utilizing Lambda with Amazon MSK embody:

1. Simplicity by way of native integration – AWS Lambda provides native integration with Amazon MSK by way of a connector useful resource known as occasion supply mapping. You need to use this integration to straight affiliate a Kafka matter—whether or not it’s on Amazon MSK or a self-managed Kafka cluster—as an occasion supply for a Lambda perform with out writing customized shopper logic. With just some configuration steps, occasion supply mapping handles partition task, offset monitoring, and parallelized batch processing underneath the hood. It makes use of the Kafka shopper group protocol to distribute matter partitions throughout a number of concurrent Lambda invocations, helps batch windowing, and permits at-least-once supply semantics. Furthermore, it mechanically commits offsets upon profitable perform execution whereas dealing with retries and dead-letter queue (DLQ) routing for failed data, considerably decreasing the operational overhead historically related to Kafka customers.
2. Auto scaling and throughput controls – When utilizing AWS Lambda with Amazon MSK by way of occasion supply mapping, Lambda mechanically scales by assigning a devoted occasion poller per Kafka partition, enabling parallel, partition-based processing. This permits 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’ll be able to configure the minimal and most variety of Kafka pollers, offering exact management over throughput and concurrency. That is best for purposes with unpredictable site visitors patterns or strict latency necessities.
3. Value-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 are not any costs for idle time, making it best 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 implies you’ll be able to course of solely the Kafka data that match particular standards. This reduces pointless perform invocations and optimizes your perform 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 report should meet to be processed. Filters will be utilized utilizing the AWS Administration Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or AWS Serverless Utility Mannequin (AWS SAM) templates. For extra particulars and examples, seek advice from the AWS Lambda documentation on occasion filtering with Amazon MSK.
5. Dealing with Availability Zone outage to your shopper – Amazon MSK permits excessive availability to your Kafka brokers by distributing them throughout a number of Availability Zones inside a Area. To keep up excessive availability throughout your utility, you equally want a shopper that provides excessive availability. AWS Lambda provides excessive availability and resilience by working your shopper capabilities throughout a number of Availability Zones in a Area. Which means even when one Availability Zone experiences an outage, your Lambda perform will proceed to function in different wholesome Availability Zones. Whereas Lambda manages safety patching and Availability Zone failure eventualities, you’ll be able to focus in your utility logic.
6. Cross-account occasion processing – Cross-account connectivity between AWS Lambda and Amazon MSK permits a Lambda perform 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 helpful for organizations that centralize Kafka infrastructure whereas sustaining separate accounts for various purposes or groups.
7. Assist 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 matter

Lambda makes use of occasion supply mappings to course of data from Amazon MSK by actively polling Kafka matters by way 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 matter and mechanically scales pollers based mostly on site visitors. For top-throughput purposes, you’ll be able to 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 perform 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 matter. When establishing Kafka as a Lambda occasion supply, you’ll be able to specify a shopper group ID to let Lambda be a part of an current Kafka shopper group. If different customers are energetic 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 circulate.

Walkthrough: Construct a serverless Kafka app with AWS Lambda

Comply with these steps to construct a serverless utility 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 matter(s). For detailed directions, seek advice from the Amazon MSK documentation.
2. Create a Lambda perform utilizing the AWS Administration Console or the AWS CLI. To study extra about making a Lambda perform, seek advice from Create your first Lambda perform. The Lambda perform’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 matter with the Lambda perform. This permits Lambda to mechanically ballot for brand new messages and course of them. Comply with the information on easy methods to 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 vital configuration parameters for the occasion supply mapping to have the ability to ballot messages out of your Kafka cluster. This contains the MSK cluster, matter title, shopper group ID, authentication technique, 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 to your occasion supply mapping.
6. Entry permissions – This includes configuring required permissions to entry the required AWS assets, and contains configuring permissions for the perform 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 further 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 necessary to tune your setup for each efficiency and cost-efficiency. Lambda provides highly effective serverless compute capabilities, however to get probably 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 might be delicate to latency—chilly begins can introduce undesirable delays. By enabling provisioned concurrency, you’ll be able to pre-warm a specified variety of Lambda situations so that they’re at all times able to deal with site visitors instantly. This eliminates chilly begins and supplies constant response occasions, which is essential for latency-critical use instances.
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 to your Kafka occasion supply mapping will depend on your utility’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 utility’s efficiency necessities. For workloads with spiky site visitors and strict efficiency wants, enhance 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 will depend on 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 matter.
3. Optimize message batching utilizing dimension and windowing – By integrating Lambda with Amazon MSK, you’ll be able to management how messages are batched earlier than they’re despatched to your perform. Tuning parameters similar to 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 influence efficiency. Bigger batches imply fewer invocations, which reduces overhead and improves throughput. Nonetheless, it’s necessary to strike a steadiness—too massive a batch or window may 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 report in your Kafka matter may require processing. To keep away from pointless Lambda invocations (and related prices), apply filtering logic straight when configuring the occasion supply mapping. With Lambda, you’ll be able to outline filtering (as much as 10 filters) standards in order that solely related data set off your perform. This helps scale back compute time, reduce noise, and optimize your funds, particularly when coping with high-throughput matters with combined content material. For Amazon MSK, Lambda commits offsets for matched and unmatched messages after efficiently invoking the perform.

Conclusion

By combining Amazon MSK with AWS Lambda, you’ll be able to seamlessly construct fashionable, serverless event-driven purposes. This integration eliminates the necessity to handle shopper teams, compute infrastructure, or scaling logic so groups can concentrate on 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 robust and versatile serverless answer. For detailed documentation on easy methods to configure Lambda with Amazon MSK, seek advice from 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 Companies (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 heart purposes.

Masudur Rahaman Sayem is a Streaming Information 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 handle complicated enterprise challenges. As an skilled in distributed computing, Sayem focuses on designing large-scale distributed techniques structure for max efficiency and scalability. He has a eager curiosity and fervour for distributed structure, which he applies to designing enterprise-grade options at web scale.