What is a Kafka Connect connector?

A connector is a pre-built, configurable component that moves data between Kafka and an external system, without requiring anyone to write custom producer or consumer code for that integration. Connectors come in two flavors: source connectors pull data from an external system (a database, a log file, an API) into a Kafka topic, and sink connectors push data from a Kafka topic out to an external system (a data warehouse, Elasticsearch, cloud storage).

{
  "name": "jdbc-source-orders",
  "config": {
    "connector.class": "io.confluent.connect.jdbc.JdbcSourceConnector",
    "connection.url": "jdbc:postgresql://db:5432/app",
    "table.whitelist": "orders",
    "topic.prefix": "db-"
  }
}

Connectors run inside a Kafka Connect worker process, which handles the operational concerns — scaling across multiple tasks, tracking source offsets, retrying failures — so the connector configuration itself is usually just a JSON document describing the external system and how to map its data, rather than an application to build and deploy from scratch.

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