Kafka Gateway Benchmarks

These benchmarks measure what Zilla Plus adds when it sits in the data path between Kafka clients and a Kafka cluster, using publish and end-to-end latency at each percentile.

Methodology

The Linux Foundation's OpenMessaging Benchmark (OMB) is an open-source, cloud-based framework for benchmarking distributed messaging systems. Every run in this series uses the Aklivity fork of OMB on AWS EC2.

An OMB workload defines the producers, consumers, topics, and message settings for a run. Each benchmark runs the same Confluent-style workload twice, once with clients connected straight to the cluster and once through Zilla Plus, so the difference between the two is what Zilla Plus adds.

Each benchmark has a Run the Benchmark page with the steps to reproduce it.

Benchmarks

Kafka Passthrough Benchmarks

Zilla Plus as a passthrough proxy in front of Apache Kafka and Confluent Cloud, compared with connecting directly.

Whole-Payload Encryption Benchmark

The cost of each layer, from the proxy hop to whole-payload and structured field encryption of JSON records.

Structured Field Encryption Benchmark

Structured field encryption across JSON, Avro, and Protobuf records, with Avro cutting end-to-end p99 by 71 ms against JSON.