Saxo Bank is on a growth journey and Kafka is a critical component to that success. Securing our financial event streams is a top priority for us and initially we started with an on-prem Kafka cluster secured with (the de-facto) Kerberos. However, as we modernize and scale, the demands of hybrid cloud, multiple domains, polyglot computing and Data Mesh require us to also modernize our approach to security. In this talk, we will describe how we took the default (non-production ready) Kafka OAuth implementation and productionized it to work with Kafka in Azure Cloud, including the Kafka stack and clients. By enabling both Kerberos and OAuth running on-prem and in the cloud, we now plan to gracefully retire Kerberos from our estate.

Talking points: 1-8

1. Writing production ready OAuth authentication backed by Azure Active Directory.
2. Running Kafka with OAuth security authentication mechanism with SSL & ACL’s.
3. Where to find the code (GitHub repo location).
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