Camunda & Kafka Connector Example

Credentials and Account Creation

You’ll need a Kafka instance running. (the easiest place to do that is confluent.cloud). You’ll need a Camunda 8 Cluster (the easiest place to do that is Camunda SaaS). Then the fun can start.

Connecting the two systems requires authentication and from your Kafka instance you’ll need the following.

• Username - You’ll get this from creating an API Key for your Kafka instance
• Password - Same as the username, it’s part of the API Key creation
• Bootstrap Server - After you create a Kafka cluster you’ll find this in the cluster settings.

🔐 It’s important to know that it’s best practice not to simply copy and paste this sensitive information directly into the model but rather to create a secret for each of these in your Camunda cluster. Then you can reference it by typing {{secrete.yourSecreteHere}} followed by the name of the key you want to access.

For this example to work you'll need to create secretes with the following names:

• KafkaUsername
• KafkaPassword
• KafkaBootstrapServer

Now you’re ready to upload and deploy the process.

Deploy and Start

Simply upload the bpmn model to your Camunda 8 account. From the modeler you can deploy the process to a cluster.

To start an instance you can create a message on your Kafka cluster to a topic called newDetails The message payload should look like this:

{
  "name" : "Niall",
  "details" : "Great Hawks Inc.",
  "value" : 1000000,
  "newStock" : true
}

The message should then be picked up by the start event and a process instance should start.