Please ensure you use version 2.6.0 or later of the confluent-kafka library.StreamNative Cloud does not support librdkafka versions 2.5.0 and 2.5.3, or any client SDKs based on these versions (including confluent-kafka-python 2.5.0 and 2.5.3). This is due to a backward compatibility regression in librdkafka that was fixed in version 2.6.0. For more information, see librdkafka #4871.For more details about version compatibility, see StreamNative Cloud Kafka Compatibility.
Create a new directory anywhere you’d like for this project: 
mkdir kafka-python-getting-started && cd kafka-python-getting-started
Create and activate a Python virtual environment to give yourself a clean, isolated environment for this project. You may use other virtual environment managers like venv if you prefer. 
virtualenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
Install the Apache Kafka Python client library: 
pip install confluent-kafka