Introducing Kafka Wireline Proxy for Solace

Due to Kafka’s log-based approach to event-driven architecture, it’s often used for data streaming applications. But what if you’ve already invested in Solace Platform as your backbone for integrating applications—do you have to choose between Kafka and Solace?

Solace has long provided connectivity to Kafka clusters via connectors and the Integrated Kafka Bridge. These tools provide the ability to bridge Solace Event Mesh and Kafka clusters. But now you can connect Kafka clients directly to Solace Platform  without using a Kafka cluster at all.

We’re excited to introduce the Kafka Wireline Proxy for Solace — a high-performance, drop-in proxy that enables Kafka clients to connect natively to Solace Event Brokers without changing a single line of application code.

Why Kafka Wireline Support for Solace?

Many commercial off-the-shelf applications and partner tools are built to speak Kafka. Until now, integrating these with Solace required custom connectors or protocol bridges. Perhaps you needed to deploy a Kafka cluster only to solve a small set of use cases. The Kafka Wireline Proxy eliminates this friction by speaking Kafka to your apps and Solace to your brokers — transparently.

This means:

• Faster onboarding of Kafka-native applications – Update your Kafka application’s configuration and connect
• Reduced integration complexity – Relieve the need to publish to Kafka and re-publish to Solace Platform and vice-versa
• Lower operational overhead – Reduce or eliminate the need for a Kafka cluster
• Broader ecosystem compatibility – The proxy adds Kafka wireline to the list of protocols supported by Solace platform

What Problems Are We Solving?

• Protocol mediation: Kafka clients can’t natively talk to Solace — until now.
• Integration overhead: No need for custom bridges or connectors.
• Operational silos: Kafka and Solace apps can now share the same event mesh.
• Partner enablement: Expose Solace events to external Kafka clients securely and easily.

How It Works

The Kafka Wireline Proxy acts as a Kafka broker facade, translating Kafka wireline protocol into Solace’s SMF protocol. Kafka producers and consumers connect to the proxy just like they would to a Kafka cluster.

For Producers

• Publish to Kafka topics — the proxy maps them to Solace topics.
• Supports key-based partitioning, schema registry, and Kafka headers.
• Choose between no-ack, leader-ack, or full-ack delivery modes.

For Consumers

• Subscribe to Kafka topics — the proxy maps them to Solace queues.
• Full support for consumer groups acting cooperatively for scalability.
• Seamless interoperability with messages from other protocols (JMS, MQTT, REST). Kafka clients can consume messages published to the Event Mesh in any protocol!

Use Cases

• Enable Native Kafka Apps: Expose Solace events to business partners or internal teams using Kafka-native tools — no code changes required. Just configure your applications to the proxy as the bootstrap server.
• Kafka Clients on an Event Mesh: Let Kafka apps participate in your Solace-powered event mesh, benefiting from Solace’s routing, filtering, and multi-protocol support.
  
• Real-Time Data Pipelines: Build hybrid pipelines using Kafka and Solace apps — ingest, transform, enrich, and distribute data across your enterprise.
• CDC Streaming: Stream CDC events from databases into Solace using Kafka CDC tools — then fan out to any

Deployment Overview

The Kafka Wireline Proxy is:

• Kubernetes-ready with stateful set deployments with external load balancers
• Secure with full SSL/TLS and mTLS support
• Cloud-native with AWS EKS deployment guides
• Flexible with deployment models including Docker images and standalone JARs

You can deploy it:

• As a container in your cloud or on-prem
• Behind a load balancer for high availability
• With fine-grained control over topic mapping, queue naming, and scaling

Where to Find the Code

Ready to Connect Kafka to Solace?

With the Kafka Wireline Proxy, you can bridge the gap between Kafka-native applications and the Solace event mesh — without compromise. Whether you’re modernizing legacy systems, enabling partner integrations, or building real-time pipelines, this proxy makes it easy.