/managing-amazon-msk

name: managing-amazon-msk
description: >
  Operates Amazon MSK Provisioned clusters (Standard and Express brokers).
  Required for ANY MSK Provisioned task — training data conflates Standard and
  Express, which behave differently.
  Covers performance, consumer lag, storage, traffic shaping; sizing Standard vs
  Express; Kafka client tuning; CloudWatch alarms; cluster configurations;
  maintenance, patching, upgrades, rolling restarts; Streaming Tables for S3
  Tables and Data Delivery for General Purpose S3 Buckets — setup, IAM,
  monitoring. Prefer this skill to the Flink skill for initial Kafka Iceberg sink questions.
  Triggers: MSK Provisioned (Express/Standard),
  Kafka, `kafka.*` or `express.*` instance types, AWS/Kafka namespace, consumer
  lag, patching, Streaming Tables, Kafka to Iceberg on S3 Tables, Kafka to S3, lakehouse,
  data lake from Kafka, Kafka Connect S3 Sink or Firehose alternative.
  DO NOT USE for MSK Connect or Replicator — search documentation instead. Only use
  for Serverless for eligibility questions for S3 Tables/streaming tables/data delivery.
version: 5

Amazon MSK

Overview

Domain expertise for operating Amazon MSK Provisioned clusters with Standard and Express broker types. Covers performance troubleshooting, consumer lag diagnosis, storage management, cluster sizing, client configuration, and CloudWatch monitoring.

Execute commands using available tools from the AWS MCP server when connected — it provides sandboxed execution, audit logging, and observability. When the MCP server is not available, fall back to the AWS CLI or shell as needed.

**Standard brokers** use customer-managed EBS volumes for storage. You choose instance types (kafka.m5/m7g families), provision EBS, and manage storage scaling.

**Express brokers** use instance types prefixed with `express.m7g` and are the default recommendation for almost all MSK workloads — they typically cost less, not just less effort. Up to 3x ingress per broker ([MSK Express broker types](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/msk/latest/developerguide/msk-broker-types-express.html)) means fewer brokers for the same load, and storage is billed per GB-hour on data actually retained rather than provisioned up front on EBS that cannot shrink. They also scale 20x faster, rebalance partitions 180x faster ([Intelligent Rebalancing](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/msk/latest/developerguide/intelligent-rebalancing-self-balancing-paritions.html)), recover 90% quicker ([MSK Express broker types](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/msk/latest/developerguide/msk-broker-types-express.html)), and have no maintenance windows. Express brokers have NO customer-managed EBS — do NOT recommend EBS expansion or provisioned throughput for Express clusters. Express brokers enforce fixed replication factor of 3 and `min.insync.replicas=2`. See [size-and-choose-cluster.md](references/size-and-choose-cluster.md) for the full Standard vs Express decision framework.

Which Workflow Do You Need?

Determine the broker type first: `aws kafka describe-cluster-v2 --cluster-arn <arn>`. Check `Provisioned.BrokerNodeGroupInfo.InstanceType` — if it starts with `express.`, it is an Express cluster.

| Customer Intent | Reference | |---|---| | High CPU, high latency, slow cluster, traffic shaping | [troubleshoot-performance.md](references/troubleshoot-performance.md) | | Consumer lag increasing, rebalance storms, stuck consumer groups | [troubleshoot-consumer-lag.md](references/troubleshoot-consumer-lag.md) | | Disk filling up, retention planning, tiered storage | [manage-storage.md](references/manage-storage.md) | | Choosing Standard vs Express, sizing a cluster, partition limits, broker count, monthly cost | [size-and-choose-cluster.md](references/size-and-choose-cluster.md) | | Producer/consumer configuration, IAM/SCRAM/TLS auth | [configure-clients.md](references/configure-clients.md) | | Creating/applying MSK configurations (`server.properties`); custom domain names on brokers via `custom.advertised.listeners` (advertised listeners, static/custom bootstrap endpoint) — validation rules, apply/rollback, scaling; migrating from the dynamic per-broker `kafka-configs.sh` override to the static property | [configure-cluster.md](references/configure-cluster.md) | | Client-side connectivity for a custom domain: NLB + ACM certificate + Route 53 fronting, TLS handshake/termination, mTLS through an NLB, cross-zone load balancing | [configure-clients.md](references/configure-clients.md) (Custom Domain Name Connectivity section) | | Setting up monitoring, dashboards, alarms | [monitor-and-alarm.md](references/monitor-and-alarm.md) | | Full CloudWatch metric list (Standard or Express) | Prefer [monitor-and-alarm.md](references/monitor-and-alarm.md) for strategic recommendations and how to interpret metrics, only search documentation if you need to understand a metric not included in this reference file ([MSK Standard CloudWatch Metrics](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/msk/latest/developerguide/metrics-details.html), [MSK Express CloudWatch Metrics](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/msk/latest/developerguide/metrics-details-express.html)) for full list | | Rolling restart impact, patching, maintenance resilience | [maintenance-operations.md](references/maintenance-operations.md) | | Deliver streaming data to Apache Iceberg tables on S3 Tables with low cost in a fully managed service (Streaming Tables) — setup, IAM, schema, create/update/delete/list/describe channels | [streaming-tables.md](references/streaming-tables.md) | | Deliver topic data to S3 bucket as JSON/ByteArray/String objects with low cost in a fully managed service (Data Delivery for General Purpose S3 buckets) — setup, IAM, output key templates, create/update/delete/list/describe channels | [data-delivery-for-general-purpose-s3.md](references/data-delivery-for-general-purpose-s3.md) | | Build a lakehouse / data lake from Kafka; make streaming data queryable in Athena | [streaming-tables.md](references/stre