Kafka Connect in Production: Scaling & Security Guide

This post provides a comprehensive guide to deploying, scaling, and securing Kafka Connect in production. It details the distributed mode architecture, Kubernetes deployment considerations, strategies for scaling workers and tasks, tuning for throughput (data formats, batching, SMTs, worker resources), error handling patterns (backpressure, Dead Letter Queue, retries, idempotency), and security best practices including transport encryption, authentication, authorization, and secret management using Secret Providers.