When teams resort to VPC peering or PrivateLink to expose Kafka, they're not solving the problem — they're managing it, one network topology decision at a time. Every new external consumer adds complexity: a new peering connection, new firewall rules, new IP space to coordinate, new potential for routing conflicts. For teams expecting to onboard dozens or hundreds of external clients, this approach doesn't scale. It transforms a connectivity challenge into an ongoing operational burden.

There's also a subtler problem: VPC peering works well for clients that speak native Kafka. But what about the HTTP-native service that needs to produce an event? What about the partner that doesn't have the Kafka client library, or the AI agent that only knows REST? Suddenly the network problem has a protocol problem layered on top of it.

The answer most teams reach for — managing each of these cases individually — is exactly what makes streaming infrastructure so expensive to operate at the edge.

What if instead of treating external access to Kafka as a network engineering problem, you treated it as a connectivity layer problem?

This is where Kong's Event Gateway changes the calculus. Rather than punching holes in your network perimeter for each new consumer, you deploy a managed connectivity layer that sits in front of your Kafka cluster and handles external access uniformly. External clients connect to the Event Gateway over the internet. The gateway handles authentication, routing, and protocol translation. Your Kafka cluster stays private and unchanged.

The immediate benefit is operational: onboarding a new external consumer becomes a gateway configuration, not a network infrastructure project. But the deeper benefit is architectural. You've decoupled who can access your event streams from how your network is structured — and that's a significantly more defensible position as your ecosystem grows.

For most external consumers, the experience through Event Gateway is exactly what they'd expect: native Kafka protocol, standard client libraries, no re-architecture on their end. The difference is that instead of requiring a direct network path into your private infrastructure, they're connecting through a managed, internet-facing endpoint that your team controls.

That distinction — same protocol, fundamentally different connectivity model — is what makes this approach scale. Adding a new consumer doesn't require a new network arrangement. It requires a gateway configuration. The operational overhead that used to grow linearly with your ecosystem stops growing that way.

For the cases where external clients aren't Kafka-native — HTTP-based services, partners without Kafka client libraries, or AI agents that speak REST — Event Gateway handles protocol mediation as well, translating between HTTP and Kafka on the backend. Most teams won't lead with this capability, but it matters when the ecosystem gets heterogeneous, which it usually does eventually.

The operational story is compelling enough on its own: eliminate VPC peering complexity, reduce per-client onboarding cost, enforce authentication and access controls at the gateway without touching Kafka's native configuration. But the strategic story is what makes Event Gateway worth thinking about now rather than when you're already drowning in network tickets.

When you move external Kafka connectivity into a managed gateway layer, you gain visibility and control that's structurally difficult to achieve any other way. You can see who's consuming what, enforce rate limits, apply access policies per topic, and audit usage — all at the connectivity layer, before anything touches your Kafka cluster.

And when your external consumers evolve — when partners want webhook-style access, when AI agents need to consume event streams in real time, when new protocols emerge — you're not re-architecting your network. You're configuring a gateway.

Kafka on the internet doesn't have to mean Kafka exposed. It means Kafka connected — on your terms, through a layer designed to handle exactly this problem.

Ready to see how Kong Event Gateway handles external Kafka connectivity? Explore the documentation→

How can I securely expose Kafka to the internet without VPC peering?

To securely expose Kafka without VPC peering, use Event Gateway. This places a managed connectivity layer between the internet and your private Kafka cluster. The gateway handles TLS termination, authentication (such as OIDC or mTLS), and traffic routing, ensuring that external clients never have direct network access to your internal brokers.

Can AI agents consume Kafka streams via REST?

Yes. An Event Gateway can bridge this gap by exposing a Kafka topic as a REST endpoint, allowing AI agents to consume real-time event data using standard HTTP methods.

How does a gateway handle authentication for external Kafka clients?

A gateway decouples authentication from the Kafka cluster itself. It can integrate with your existing Identity Provider (IdP) to validate credentials—such as API keys, OAuth tokens, or mTLS certificates—at the edge. Once the client is authenticated, the gateway proxies the traffic to the Kafka cluster, often using a distinct internal service account, ensuring your internal cluster security settings don't need to be exposed externally.

Is there a performance impact when using a gateway for Kafka?

Any additional hop in a network introduces some latency, but a high-performance gateway is designed to minimize this overhead. By offloading resource-intensive tasks like SSL termination and authentication handshake to the gateway, you can often preserve the throughput of your core Kafka brokers. For most external partner use cases, the security and manageability benefits far outweigh the negligible latency difference compared to direct peering.