Stream connect for Kafka- how to setup customer Kafka instance

[Wasif]

Read through about the Stream connect for Kafka that has been introduced in Utah and understood that as opposed to being tied with Confluent Cloud's Rest proxy for Kafka (and accessing the Kafka via Rest) as ServiceNow earlier was in a way a non-native application and connecting to Kafka via Rest was the only option...
and with the new architecture Kafka can be accessed via the Kafka native protocols and is not tied to Rest being used which is an approach for non-native Kafka clients.

We had a kafka requirement in the past, but could not go through coz a) the customer Kafka was not on Confluent cloud with direct Rest proxy enabled b) On AWS or Azure (where their Kafka was present) some additional things needed to be done for the Confluent platform installation for the Rest proxy to be enabled and the cloud team did not see much ROI for development for for just 1 use case for ServiceNow, as other projects/ apps were accessing their Kafka via native methods...

Well coming back to Stream connect,
Based on the architecture, I could not understand how to plug our Kafka environment to ServiceNow.
Some of our non-ServiceNow projects are using Kafka on Azure and some via AWS and we would also like to leverage it and integrate with other apps via Kafka, but not able to understand how to start...has anyone started with this or any POC underway?

Any direction or resource would be helpful.

Attaching screenshot of the new architecture took from the Utah release Creator Toolbox

[Danny Craigie]

Hi,
The quick start guide was my go to. https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/xanadu-integrate-applications/page/administer/integrationhub/conc...
It's a patchy process at best with a lot of critical pieces.
Make sure you have a default topic on the consumer instance otherwise it prevents the stream connecting. 
Test the Hermes Messaging connection details how to install kafka and command to list topics: 
https://www.servicenow.com/docs/bundle/xanadu-integrate-applications/page/administer/integrationhub/...
Creating topics and publishing message commands are detailed here:
https://www.servicenow.com/docs/bundle/xanadu-integrate-applications/page/administer/integrationhub/...

https://kafka.apache.org/quickstart

Hope that helps