If your team is managing Kafka at scale, here are five concrete steps you can take to immediately reduce cost and operational complexity — without sacrificing performance.

1. Stop duplicating clusters for isolation

When teams ask for isolated Kafka environments, spinning up a new cluster might feel like the safest path. But that approach quickly becomes expensive.

How can Kong Event Gateway help?

Use Virtual Clusters in Kong Event Gateway to offer logical isolation on shared infrastructure. You get the benefits of dedicated environments without multiplying your cluster footprint.

Result: Less infrastructure to manage. Lower cloud costs. Faster provisioning.

2. Reduce topic sprawl with centralized, filtered access

Creating duplicate topics to deliver filtered data to different consumers is a common workaround — but it creates topic sprawl. Using topic partitions to provide data isolation isn’t what partitions were designed for and isn’t scalable.

How can Kong Event Gateway help?

Kong Event Gateway lets you expose subsets of data from a single topic, using virtual topics and policy-based filtering*. No need to create and manage parallel topics for every access pattern.

Result: Cleaner architecture. Fewer partitions. Better Kafka performance.

3. Replace custom glue code with protocol mediation

Need to expose real-time data to non-Kafka consumers? Writing and maintaining custom proxies, connectors, or pipelines adds up in development effort and risk.

How can Kong Event Gateway help?

Use Kong Event Gateway’s protocol mediation capabilities to expose Kafka streams as REST APIs or using Server-Sent Events — instantly accessible to any application.

Result: Faster integrations. No glue code. Lower development and maintenance overhead.

4. Apply consistent access control and auditing

Managing ACLs and client permissions inside Kafka is complex, inconsistent, and tough to scale across large teams or external users.

How can Kong Event Gateway help?

Shift security and access control to the API layer. Kong lets you enforce OAuth2, JWT, API key policies, and RBAC for both APIs and Kafka — with full observability and audit trails.

Result: Stronger security posture. Less custom configuration. Simplified compliance.

5. Centralize discovery and promote reuse

Redundant pipelines and event streams are often a symptom of poor visibility. Developers don’t know what topics exist or how to get access, resulting in duplication of effort and infrastructure.

How can Kong Event Gateway help?

Expose Kafka topics through AsyncAPIs in Kong’s Developer Portal alongside traditional APIs. Include documentation, usage guidelines, and access workflows — all in one place*.

Result: Fewer duplicate efforts. Faster onboarding. More value from what you already have.

Cut costs without cutting capability

Reducing Kafka overhead doesn’t mean scaling back your real-time ambitions. It means managing Kafka like a platform — with the same controls, automation, and self-service you already apply to your APIs.

Kong Event Gateway brings modern API management to Kafka — so you can scale event streaming without scaling your infrastructure, team, or complexity.

Ready to make Kafka simpler and more cost-effective? Talk to our API experts today.

* Note: Kong Native Event Proxy, part of Kong Event Gateway, is an Early Access Product. Some features referenced in this blog will be rolled out incrementally this year.