Which service is the fully managed offering for Apache Kafka on AWS?

• A. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
• B. AWS Glue
• C. Amazon Athena
• D. Amazon MSK

Answer: (D)

Amazon MSK is the fully managed service for Apache Kafka on AWS. It provisions and manages the Kafka brokers, handles software patching and maintenance, and takes care of scaling and automatic failover, so you don’t have to operate the Kafka cluster yourself. You still use the Kafka client APIs to produce and consume data, manage topics and partitions, and set data retention, but the underlying infrastructure and reliability are managed by AWS.

This differs from the other options because they are not Apache Kafka. Kinesis Data Streams is AWS’s own streaming service with a different API and semantics. AWS Glue is an ETL and data integration service, not a streaming platform. Amazon Athena is a serverless query service for data in S3, not a streaming system. If you need Kafka compatibility and the ecosystem around it while offloading cluster maintenance, MSK is the right choice.