kafka-streams-wordcount | This example counts words from 'wordcount-input ' topic | Pub Sub library

We have confluents platform in our infrastructure. At core, we are using kafka broker to distribute events. Dozens of devices produce events to kafka topics (there is a kafka topic for each type of event), where events are serialized in google's protobuf. We have confluent's schema registry to keep track of the protobuf schemas.

What we need is, for several events, we need to apply some transformation and then publish the transformation output to some other kafka topic. Of course Kafka Streams is one way to accomplish that, like in this example. However, we don't want to have a java application for each transformation (which increase the complexity of the project and development/deployment effort), and it doesn't feels right to put all streams in one application (modifying one will require to stop all streams ans start again).

At this point, we thought that maybe Confluent's Kafka Connect might be better approach. We can have several workers, and we can deploy them into one kafka connect instance/or cluster. The question is;

Does it make sense to use kafka connect to get message from one kafka topic and send it to another kafka topic? Be cause all the use cases and examples aims to get data from outside (database, file etc.) to kafka, and from kafka to outside.