AWS Certified Data Analytics – Specialty — Question 84

A central government organization is collecting events from various internal applications using Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK).
The organization has configured a separate Kafka topic for each application to separate the data. For security reasons, the Kafka cluster has been configured to only allow TLS encrypted data and it encrypts the data at rest.
A recent application update showed that one of the applications was configured incorrectly, resulting in writing data to a Kafka topic that belongs to another application. This resulted in multiple errors in the analytics pipeline as data from different applications appeared on the same topic. After this incident, the organization wants to prevent applications from writing to a topic different than the one they should write to.
Which solution meets these requirements with the least amount of effort?

Answer options

• A. Create a different Amazon EC2 security group for each application. Configure each security group to have access to a specific topic in the Amazon MSK cluster. Attach the security group to each application based on the topic that the applications should read and write to.
• B. Install Kafka Connect on each application instance and configure each Kafka Connect instance to write to a specific topic only.
• C. Use Kafka ACLs and configure read and write permissions for each topic. Use the distinguished name of the clients' TLS certificates as the principal of the ACL.
• D. Create a different Amazon EC2 security group for each application. Create an Amazon MSK cluster and Kafka topic for each application. Configure each security group to have access to the specific cluster.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

The correct answer is B because installing Kafka Connect allows each application instance to be configured to write only to its assigned topic, thus preventing data from different applications from mixing. Option A does not directly restrict writing permissions to specific topics. Option C, while effective for permissions, requires more manual configuration and does not assure that applications will only write to their own topics. Option D creates unnecessary complexity by requiring separate clusters for each application rather than a more straightforward topic separation.