Real-Time Compliance & Audit Logging With Apache Kafka®

This post details building a real-time compliance and audit logging pipeline using Apache Kafka, Kafka Connect, stream processing (Kafka Streams/Flink), and immutable object storage. It outlines the requirements for such a pipeline (data accuracy, immutability, long-term retention, security, low-latency processing, auditability/lineage) and presents a reference architecture. Key components include connectors for ingestion, stream processing for normalization/enrichment/validation, tiered storage for long-term retention, and access layers for monitoring and querying. It also emphasizes end-to-end governance through RBAC, data masking, and data lineage.