The Kinesis source connector pulls data from Amazon Kinesis and persists data into Pulsar. For more information about connectors, see Connector Overview.

This connector uses the Kinesis Consumer Library (KCL) to consume messages. The KCL uses DynamoDB to track checkpoints for consumers, and uses CloudWatch to track metrics for consumers.

This document introduces how to get started with creating an AWS Kinesis source connector and get it up and running.

Currently, the Kinesis source connector only supports raw messages. If you use AWS Key Management Service (KMS) encrypted messages, the encrypted messages are sent to Pulsar directly. You need to manually decrypt the data on the consumer side of Pulsar.

​
Quick start

​
Prerequisites

The prerequisites for connecting an AWS Kinesis source connector to external systems include:

  1. Create a Kinesis data stream in AWS.
  2. Create an AWS User and an AccessKey(Please record the value of AccessKey and its SecretKey).
  3. Assign the following permissions to the AWS User:

​
1. Create a connector

The following command shows how to use pulsarctl to create a builtin connector. If you want to create a non-builtin connector, you need to replace --source-type kinesis with --archive /path/to/pulsar-io-kinesis.nar. You can find the button to download the nar package at the beginning of the document.

If you are a StreamNative Cloud user, you need set up your environment first.

pulsarctl sources create \
  --source-type kinesis \
  --name kinesis-source \
  --tenant public \
  --namespace default \
  --destination-topic-name "Your topic name" \
  --parallelism 1 \
  --source-config \
  '{
    "awsRegion": "Your aws kinesis region", 
    "awsKinesisStreamName": "Your kinesis stream name",
    "awsCredentialPluginParam": "{\"accessKey\":\"Your AWS access key\",\"secretKey\":\"Your AWS secret access key\"}",
    "applicationName": "Your application name, which will be used as the table name for DynamoDB. E.g.: pulsar-io-kinesis"
  }'

The --source-config is the minimum necessary configuration for starting this connector, and it is a JSON string. You need to substitute the relevant parameters with your own. If you want to configure more parameters, see Configuration Properties for reference.

You can also choose to use a variety of other tools to create a connector:

​
2. Send messages to Kinesis

The following example uses KPL to send data to Kinesis. For more details, see Writing to your Kinesis Data Stream Using the KPL

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

  AWSCredentialsProvider credentialsProvider =
  new AWSStaticCredentialsProvider(new BasicAWSCredentials("Your access key", "Your secret key"));

  KinesisProducerConfiguration kinesisConfig = new KinesisProducerConfiguration();
  kinesisConfig.setRegion("Your aws kinesis region");
  kinesisConfig.setCredentialsProvider(credentialsProvider);
  KinesisProducer kinesis = new KinesisProducer(kinesisConfig);
  // Put some records 
  for (int i = 0; i < 10; ++i) {
    ByteBuffer data = ByteBuffer.wrap("test-kinesis-data".getBytes("UTF-8"));
    // doesn't block       
    kinesis.addUserRecord("Your kinesis stream name", "myPartitionKey", data);
  }
  kinesis.flush();
  Thread.sleep(60000);
}

​
3. Show data using Pulsar client

If your connector is created on StreamNative Cloud, you need to authenticate your clients. See Build applications using Pulsar clients for more information.

bin/pulsar-client \
--url "Your Pulsar serviceUrl" \
consume "The topic that you specified when you created the connector" -s "test-sub" -n 10 -p Earliest

----- got message -----
key:[myPartitionKey], properties:[=49643665543143983613442895450427674751028642409795813410], content:test-kinesis-data
sidebarTitle: overview.md
----- got message -----
key:[myPartitionKey], properties:[=49643665543143983613442895450430092602667871668145225762], content:test-kinesis-data
----- got message -----
key:[myPartitionKey], properties:[=4964366554314398361344289545044.0.3528487486297319931938], content:test-kinesis-data
sidebarTitle: overview.md
----- got message -----
key:[myPartitionKey], properties:[=49643665543143983613442895450432510454.0.300926494638114], content:test-kinesis-data
----- got message -----
key:[myPartitionKey], properties:[=49643665543143983613442895450433719380126715555669344290], content:test-kinesis-data
sidebarTitle: overview.md
----- got message -----
key:[myPartitionKey], properties:[=4964366554314398361344289545043492830594633018484.0.3466], content:test-kinesis-data
----- got message -----
key:[myPartitionKey], properties:[=4964366554314398361344289545043614.0.3765944814018756642], content:test-kinesis-data
sidebarTitle: overview.md
----- got message -----
key:[myPartitionKey], properties:[=49643665543143983613442895450437346157585559443193462818], content:test-kinesis-data
----- got message -----
key:[myPartitionKey], properties:[=49643665543143983613442895450438555083405174072368168994], content:test-kinesis-data
sidebarTitle: overview.md
----- got message -----
key:[myPartitionKey], properties:[=49643665543143983613442895450439764009224788701542875170], content:test-kinesis-data

​
Configuration Properties

This table outlines the properties of an AWS Kinesis source connector.

NameTypeRequiredSensitiveDefaultDescription
awsKinesisStreamNameStringtruefalse” ” (empty string)The Kinesis stream name.
awsRegionStringfalsefalse” ” (empty string)The AWS region.

Example
us-west-1, us-west-2.
awsCredentialPluginNameStringfalsefalse” ” (empty string)The fully-qualified class name of implementation of AwsCredentialProviderPlugin. For more information, see [Configure AwsCredentialProviderPlugin](###Configure AwsCredentialProviderPlugin).
awsCredentialPluginParamStringfalsetrue” ” (empty string)The JSON parameter to initialize awsCredentialsProviderPlugin. For more information, see [Configure AwsCredentialProviderPlugin](###Configure AwsCredentialProviderPlugin).
awsEndpointStringfalsefalse” ” (empty string)The Kinesis end-point URL, which can be found at here.
dynamoEndpointStringfalsefalse” ” (empty string)The Dynamo end-point URL, which can be found at here.
cloudwatchEndpointStringfalsefalse” ” (empty string)The Cloudwatch end-point URL. For more information, seeAmazon documentation.
applicationNameStringfalsefalsePulsar IO connectorThe name of the Amazon Kinesis application, which will be used as the table name for DynamoDB.
initialPositionInStreamInitialPositionInStreamfalsefalseLATESTThe position where the connector starts from.

Below are the available options:

  • AT_TIMESTAMP: start from the record at or after the specified timestamp.
  • LATEST: start after the most recent data record.
  • TRIM_HORIZON: start from the oldest available data record.
    • startAtTimeDatefalsefalse” ” (empty string)If set to AT_TIMESTAMP, it specifies the time point to start consumption.
    checkpointIntervalLongfalsefalse60000The frequency of the Kinesis stream checkpoint in milliseconds.
    backoffTimeLongfalsefalse3000The amount of time to delay between requests when the connector encounters a throttling exception from AWS Kinesis in milliseconds.
    numRetriesintfalsefalse3The number of re-attempts when the connector encounters an exception while trying to set a checkpoint.
    receiveQueueSizeintfalsefalse1000The maximum number of AWS records that can be buffered inside the connector.

    Once the receiveQueueSize is reached, the connector does not consume any messages from Kinesis until some messages in the queue are successfully consumed.
    useEnhancedFanOutbooleanfalsefalsetrueIf set to true, it uses Kinesis enhanced fan-out.

    If set to false, it uses polling.

    ​
    Configure AwsCredentialProviderPlugin

    AWS Kinesis source connector allows you to use three ways to connect to AWS Kinesis by configuring awsCredentialPluginName.

    • Leave awsCredentialPluginName empty to get the connector authenticated by passing accessKey and secretKey in awsCredentialPluginParam.

      {"accessKey":"Your access key","secretKey":"Your secret key"}

    • Set awsCredentialPluginName to org.apache.pulsar.io.aws.AwsDefaultProviderChainPlugin to use the default AWS provider chain. With this option, you don’t need to configure awsCredentialPluginParam. For more information, see AWS documentation.

    • Set awsCredentialPluginNameto org.apache.pulsar.io.aws.STSAssumeRoleProviderPlugin to use the default AWS provider chain, and you need to configure roleArn and roleSessionNmae in awsCredentialPluginParam. For more information, see AWS documentation

      {"roleArn": "arn...", "roleSessionName": "name"}