Materialize/doc/user/content/ingest-data/kafka/confluent-cloud.md

---

title: "Confluent Cloud" description: "How to securely connect a Confluent Cloud Kafka cluster as a source to Materialize." aliases:

• /integrations/confluent-cloud/
• /connect-sources/confuent-cloud/
• /ingest-data/confluent-cloud/ menu: main: parent: "kafka" name: "Confluent Cloud" ---

[//]: # "TODO(morsapaes) The Kafka guides need to be rewritten for consistency with the Postgres ones. We should include spill to disk in the guidance then."

This guide goes through the required steps to connect Materialize to a Confluent Cloud Kafka cluster.

{{< tip >}} {{< guided-tour-blurb-for-ingest-data >}} {{< /tip >}}

If you already have a Confluent Cloud Kafka cluster, you can skip step 1 and directly move on to Create an API Key. You can also skip step 3 if you already have a Confluent Cloud Kafka cluster up and running, and have created a topic that you want to create a source for.

The process to connect Materialize to a Confluent Cloud Kafka cluster consists of the following steps:

1. Create a Confluent Cloud Kafka cluster

   If you already have a Confluent Cloud Kafka cluster set up, then you can skip this step.

   a. Sign in to Confluent Cloud

   b. Choose Create a new cluster

   c. Select the cluster type, and specify the rest of the settings based on your needs

   d. Choose Create cluster

   Note: This creation can take about 10 minutes. For more information on the cluster creation, see Confluent Cloud documentation.

2. Create an API Key

   API Key

   a. Navigate to the Confluent Cloud dashboard

   b. Choose the Confluent Cloud Kafka cluster you just created in Step 1

   c. Click on the API Keys tab

   d. In the API Keys section, choose Add Key

   e. Specify the scope for the API key and then click Create Key. If you choose to create a granular access API key, make sure to create a service account and add an ACL with Read access to the topic you want to create a source for.

   Take note of the API Key you just created, as well as the API Key secret key; you'll need them later on. Keep in mind that the API Key secret key contains sensitive information, and you should store it somewhere safe!

3. Create a topic

   To start using Materialize with Confluent Cloud, you need to point it to an existing Kafka topic you want to read data from.

   If you already have a topic created, you can skip this step.

   Otherwise, you can find more information about how to do that here.

4. Create a source in Materialize

   a. Open the Confluent Cloud dashboard and select your cluster.

   b. Click on Overview and select Cluster settings.

   c. Copy the URL under Bootstrap server. This will be your <broker-url> going forward.

   d. Connect to Materialize using the SQL Shell, or your preferred SQL client.

   e. Run the following command. Replace <confluent_cloud> with whatever you want to name your source. The broker URL is what you copied in step c of this subsection. The <topic-name> is the name of the topic you created in Step 4. The <your-api-key> and <your-api-secret> are from the Create an API Key step.

     CREATE SECRET confluent_username AS '<your-api-key>';
     CREATE SECRET confluent_password AS '<your-api-secret>';
   
     CREATE CONNECTION <confluent_cloud> TO KAFKA (
       BROKER '<confluent-broker-url>',
       SASL MECHANISMS = 'PLAIN',
       SASL USERNAME = SECRET confluent_username,
       SASL PASSWORD = SECRET confluent_password
     );
   
     CREATE SOURCE <source-name>
       FROM KAFKA CONNECTION confluent_cloud (TOPIC '<topic-name>')
       FORMAT JSON;
   

   By default, the source will be created in the active cluster; to use a different cluster, use the IN CLUSTER clause.

   f. If the command executes without an error and outputs CREATE SOURCE, it means that you have successfully connected Materialize to your Confluent Cloud Kafka cluster.

   Note: The example above walked through creating a source, which is a way of connecting Materialize to an external data source. We created a connection to Confluent Cloud Kafka using SASL authentication and credentials securely stored as secrets in Materialize's secret management system. For input formats, we used JSON, but you can also ingest Kafka messages formatted in e.g. Avro and Protobuf. You can find more details about the various different supported formats and possible configurations in the reference documentation.