Architecture: Kafka Active-Active with Confluent Bidirectional Cluster Linking

Your Confluent Cluster Linking DR setup is solid. Two clusters, one link, replication lag under five seconds. Then your platform team asks a reasonable question: the DR cluster is sitting idle, your producers in the secondary region are paying cross-regional latency on every write, and a failover still involves a manual promotion step. Can both clusters carry live traffic simultaneously? Can a regional outage become a non-event rather than an in… Read More

Architecture: Confluent Cluster Linking

Your primary Kafka cluster handles millions of events per day without complaint. Then a cloud provider has a regional outage. The brokers are unreachable, the consumer lag metrics are gone, and your on-call engineer is staring at a 45-minute RTO commitment they have no clear path to meeting. The standard answer for years was MirrorMaker 2: deploy a separate replication cluster, manage connector configs, accept that consumer offsets won't tra… Read More