Apache Kafka Series - Kafka Connect Hands-on Learning (Udemy.com)
Kafka Connect - Learn How to Source Twitter Data, Store in Apache Kafka Topics & Sink in ElasticSearch and PostgreSQL
Created by: Stephane Maarek
Last updated September 2026
What you will learn
- Configure and run Apache Kafka Source and Sink Connectors
- Learn concepts behind Kafka Connect & the Kafka Connect architecture
- Launch a Kafka Connect Cluster using Docker Compose
- Deploy Kafka Connectors in Standalone and Distributed Mode
- Write your own Kafka Connector
Quality Score
Overall Score : 92 / 100
Course Description
A Comprehensive and Brand New Course for Learning Apache Kafka Connect Framework with Hands-on Training – (Launched in April 2017)
Kafka Connect is a tool for scalable and reliable streaming data between Apache Kafka and other data systems. Apache Kafka Connect is a common framework for Apache Kafka producers and consumers.
Apache Kafka Connect offers an API, Runtime, and REST Service to enable developers to define connectors that move large data sets into and out of Apache Kafka in real time. It inherits strong concepts such as fault-tolerance and elasticity thanks to being an extension of Apache Kafka. Kafka Connect can ingest entire databases, collect metrics, gather logs from all your application servers into Apache Kafka topics, making the data available for stream processing with low latency.
Kafka Connect standardises integration of other data systems with Apache Kafka, simplifying connector development, deployment, and management.
In this course, we are going to learn the Kafka Connector deployment, configuration and management with hands-on exercises. We are also going to see the distributed and standalone modes to scale up to a large, centrally managed service supporting an entire organisation or scale down to development, testing, and small production deployments. The REST interface to submit and manage connectors to your Kafka Connect cluster via an easy to use REST API’s.
Students Loved this course – Students have rated the course with 5 stars...!!
Tin Pavlinic says “This course is an excellent resource for those getting started with Apache Kafka-Connect. Stephane explains concepts very clearly and provides plenty of practical examples. The setup is easy. You can follow the examples along on your own machine, and then experiment further. I highly recommend this Apache Kafka course.”
Alan V says "This course is GREAT: 1. The teacher provides clear explanations of the role to Kafka Connector in Kafka Streaming Solution architecture. 2. The course uses docker-compose.yml to help learners quick build a practice environment. 3. The course is well organized and easy to understand the idea, behind Kafka Connector. The teacher guides you how to use the tool step by step. 4. The provided shell commands are all well commented and steps by steps to guide users. If you read the comments in the shell script files after the course, it will remind you what the teacher just taught in the videos. 5. The teacher is very responsible to learners' questions and very helpful. If you are a professional developer, I highly recommend you to attend this course."
Sagar Joshi says "It was very engaging and interesting course. I recommend taking this Apache Kafka course. Stephane has provided all the required details and its really a hands-on training course. Thank you..!!"
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Instructor
My name is Stephane Maarek, and I'll be your instructor in this course. I teach about Apache Kafka, the Kafka ecosystem and Kafka Certifications with my focus always on helping my students improve their professional proficiencies. I am also the co-founder of Conduktor: an enterprise Apache Kafka platform & UI to help everyone use Kafka.
Throughout my career in designing and delivering these certifications and courses, I have already taught 1,000,000+ students and gotten 350,000+ reviews!
With Apache Kafka becoming much more than a buzzword out there, I've decided it's time for students to properly learn how to be a Kafka professional. So, let’s kick start the course! You are in good hands!
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This Course Also Comes With:
Lifetime Access to All Future Updates
A responsive instructor in the Q&A Section
Links to interesting articles, and lots of good code to base your next applications onto
Udemy Certificate of Completion Ready for Download
This is the course that could improve your career!
Apache Kafka is a skill in high demand and there are not enough people to fulfill all the open positions. You can boost your income, take on new roles and fun challenges. Many of my students are now the Kafka experts of their companies! You can be the next!
I hope to see you inside the course!
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Note: Looking for more advanced Kafka concepts? There are many volumes in the Apache Kafka Series:
Learn Kafka for Beginners v2 (great to start)
Kafka Connect Hands On Learning
Kafka Streams for Data Processing
KSQL on ksqlDB - Hands On!
Kafka Cluster Setup & Administration
Confluent Schema Registry & Kafka REST Proxy
Kafka Security (SSL SASL ACL)
Kafka Monitoring and Operations
Happy learning!
Instructor Details
- 4.6 Rating
5,936 Reviews
Stephane Maarek
Stephane is a solutions architect, consultant and software developer that has a particular interest in all things related to Cloud & Big Data. He's also a many-times best seller instructor on Udemy for his courses in AWS and Apache Kafka.
[See FAQ below to see in which order you can take my courses]
Stéphane is recognized as an AWS Hero and is an AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional & AWS Certified DevOps Professional. He loves to teach people how to use the AWS properly, to get them ready for their AWS certifications, and most importantly for the real world.
He also loves Apache Kafka. He used on the Program Committee organizing the Kafka Summit in New York, London and San Francisco. He also was an active member of the Apache Kafka community, and has authored blogs on Medium and the guest blog for Confluent. He also has co-founded Conduktor, a prominent company in the Kafka ecosystem.
During his spare time, Stéphane composes piano music, that he publishes online under the artist name Makera ?
FAQ: In which order should you learn?...
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Reviews
By Davide Goss on 10/22/2025
The course is well structured and it gave me a lot of information and hints to explore. The course could be updated with links and tools (e.g.: Docker images of "Landoop" and Confluence documentation pages) yet present and downloadable in current year. For the rest, thank you!
By Adam Crowther on 1/4/2023
The course itsself is good, I was able to learn what I needed. Unfortunately it relies on a couple of dependencies, which have changed since the course was created: - Landoop "fast-data-dev" Kafka Cluster Docker image - Twitter Docker Connect Source plugin - Twitter API These dependencies have all changed, and it takes a lot of troubleshooting and head-scratching to get the exercises in the running. In the end it's not possible to get the distributed connector exercises running, because Twitter has removed access to API 1.1, which is needed for the Twitter Source Connector. Apparently it's possible to get 'Elevated' permissions to get access to API 1.1, but they didn't grant that to me. IMHO this course needs to be redone, using a single, stable version of the Landoop image that actually works, and using some other source of input data - probably the WikiMedia source that was used in the previous course.
By Bhagyashree Singh on 1/20/2022
I thoroughly enjoyed every single lecture of this course. Especially, had most fun with section about building custom Kafka Connector. No other course walks you through the code line by line and shows how it is done. Stephan teaching style is very simple.
By Ankur Pandey on 9/8/2021
Amazing course, Thanks Stephane Maarek Sir, I learn lot of new concepts. The concepts are made very simple to understand. It is very well organised. It is the best course for all levels.
By Fouad on 5/26/2021
amazing course , i would add more details about the section of Advanced Concepts , section 9 its less clear how to do the kafka connect outside of the landop , me on windows facing a lot of issues, in general its very good course
By Michael Henderson on 8/28/2020
Good course. Wish it was a little more coding hands on. I inherited a huge Kafka application, with many FIX Source Connectors, all written in Scala. I'm a Java dev, with limited Kafka experience, but no Connector experience. Section 8 of this course helped me understand what was going on with these Connectors.
By Carol Selestin on 2/4/2020
The course covered very fine details of the Kafka Connect. Stephane explains the concepts quite clearly and interestingly, and the hands-on was very effective. Although I agree that the landoop Kafka image was quite simple to use, I would suggest using the basic Apache Kafka for demonstration and development which most of the developers will be using in their projects.
By André Faria on 1/12/2020
I did this course after Beginners V2 and Streams course, so i found the firsts sections very simple, but section 8 and 9 were more complex, interesting and very util. Worth it. Stephane is a great teacher.
By Morien Roberts on 4/6/2019
Thought that there would have been some coverage of the connect transforms. One of the lectures mentions that topic would be added soon but that was some time back. The Java GitHub code example throws an integer error when e.g. a 502 response is received from the Git repository which happens quite frequently. Code needs to be modified to check that e.g. headers such as “X-RateLimit-Limit” exist before converting to an integer. Running the connector using the default values for the connector properties results in a topic that is populated but a short time later the values disappear. It took some time to realize that Kafka was deleting the items as they were well beyond the default 7 day retention period for the topic. Useful debugging exercise but caused significant confusion. The end of the course covering distributed connectors seemed a bit rushed.
By Jagan Naidu on 10/22/2018
I like the fact that the videos are self-paced. this course has a lot of helpful information, and the instructor presents it in a thorough and captivating manner. hats off to Stephane. thanks.

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