MCPInstall

managing-amazon-msk

by aws OfficialDevOps & Cloud

Operates Amazon MSK Provisioned clusters (Standard and Express brokers). Required for ANY MSK Provisioned task — training data conflates Standard and Express. Covers performance, consumer lag, storage, traffic shaping; sizing Standard vs Express; Kafka client tuning; CloudWatch alarms; cluster configs; maintenance, patching, rolling restarts; topic management; MSK Replicator setup for DR and active-active/active-passive replication (same-/cross-account), including throughput and partition sizing; Streaming Tables for S3 Tables and Data Delivery for General Purpose S3 — setup, IAM, monitoring. Prefer Flink for Kafka Iceberg sink questions. Migrations: use migrate-to-msk. Triggers: MSK Provisioned, Kafka, kafka./express. types, AWS/Kafka namespace, cross-cluster replication, Kafka to Iceberg on S3 Tables, Kafka to S3, lakehouse, data lake from Kafka, Kafka Connect S3 Sink or Firehose alternative. DO NOT USE for MSK Connect — search docs instead. Serverless: only S3 Tables/data deli

Installs
5.1K
Last 24h
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#3653
Security
Pass

Install

Works with every agent the skills CLI supports.

npx skills add https://github.com/aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws --skill managing-amazon-msk
  1. 01

    Install

    Run the command in your project. The CLI asks which agents to install for.

  2. 02

    Describe the task

    Ask your agent for something this skill covers. It loads managing-amazon-msk automatically when relevant.

  3. 03

    Review the result

    The agent follows the SKILL.md steps, scripts and references bundled with the skill.

Security audits

Independent scans of the skill's instructions and bundled files.

Gen Agent Trust Hub PassSAFE ·This skill provides documentation and tools for managing Amazon MSK clusters. No security risks were identified, and the skill follows industry best practices for configuration management.
Socket PassNo alerts
Snyk PassLOW ·Risk: LOW · No issues

SKILL.md

The instructions your agent reads when the skill is triggered.

Amazon MSK

Overview

Domain expertise for operating Amazon MSK Provisioned clusters with Standard and Express broker types. Covers performance troubleshooting, consumer lag diagnosis, storage management, cluster sizing, client configuration, and CloudWatch monitoring.

Execute commands using available tools from the AWS MCP server when connected — it provides sandboxed execution, audit logging, and observability. When the MCP server is not available, fall back to the AWS CLI or shell as needed.

Standard brokers use customer-managed EBS volumes for storage. You choose instance types (kafka.m5/m7g families), provision EBS, and manage storage scaling.

Express brokers use instance types prefixed with express.m7g and are the default recommendation for almost all MSK workloads — they typically cost less, not just less effort. Up to 3x ingress per broker (MSK Express broker types) means fewer brokers for the same load, and storage is billed per GB-hour on data actually retained rather than provisioned up front on EBS that cannot shrink. They also scale 20x faster, rebalance partitions 180x faster (Intelligent Rebalancing), recover 90% quicker (MSK Express broker types), and have no maintenance windows. Express brokers have NO customer-managed EBS — do NOT recommend EBS expansion or provisioned throughput for Express clusters. Express brokers enforce fixed replication factor of 3 and min.insync.replicas=2. See size-and-choose-cluster.md for the full Standard vs Express decision framework.

Which Workflow Do You Need?

Determine the broker type first: aws kafka describe-cluster-v2 --cluster-arn <arn>. Check Provisioned.BrokerNodeGroupInfo.InstanceType — if it starts with express., it is an Express cluster.

Customer IntentReference
High CPU, high latency, slow cluster, traffic shapingtroubleshoot-performance.md
Consumer lag increasing, rebalance storms, stuck consumer groupstroubleshoot-consumer-lag.md
Disk filling up, retention planning, tiered storagemanage-storage.md
Choosing Standard vs Express, sizing a cluster, partition limits, broker count, monthly costsize-and-choose-cluster.md
Producer/consumer configuration, IAM/SCRAM/TLS authconfigure-clients.md
Creating/applying MSK configurations (server.properties); custom domain names on brokers via custom.advertised.listeners (advertised listeners, static/custom bootstrap endpoint) — validation rules, apply/rollback, scaling; migrating from the dynamic per-broker kafka-configs.sh override to the static propertyconfigure-cluster.md
Client-side connectivity for a custom domain: NLB + ACM certificate + Route 53 fronting, TLS handshake/termination, mTLS through an NLB, cross-zone load balancingconfigure-clients.md (Custom Domain Name Connectivity section)
Create, update, delete, list, or describe Kafka topics; when to use the native topic APIs / CfnTopic vs. a Kafka admin clientmanage-topics.md
MSK Replicator setup, migration, DR, active-active/active-passive, cross-account replication, self-managed-to-MSK or MSK-to-MSK, loop-prevention/topic-naming behaviormsk-replicator.md
Replication throughput per partition, how many partitions a replicator needs, why replicator scaling isn't increasing throughput, replicator quotas (topics, ingress, record size), ReplicationLatency/MessageLag/ReplicatorThroughputmsk-replicator.md (Size partition count section)
Setting up monitoring, dashboards, alarmsmonitor-and-alarm.md
Full CloudWatch metric list (Standard or Express)Prefer monitor-and-alarm.md for strategic recommendations and how to interpret metrics, only search documentation if you need to understand a metric not included in this reference file (MSK Standard CloudWatch Metrics, MSK Express CloudWatch Metrics) for full list
Rolling restart impact, patching, maintenance resiliencemaintenance-operations.md
Deliver streaming data to Apache Iceberg tables on S3 Tables with low cost in a fully managed service (Streaming Tables) — setup, IAM, schema, create/update/delete/list/describe channelsstreaming-tables.md
Deliver topic data to S3 bucket as JSON/ByteArray/String objects with low cost in a fully managed service (Data Delivery for General Purpose S3 buckets) — setup, IAM, output key templates, create/update/delete/list/describe channelsdata-delivery-for-general-purpose-s3.md
Build a lakehouse / data lake from Kafka; make streaming data queryable in Athenastreaming-tables.md
Alternative to Kafka Connect S3 Sink or Amazon Data Firehose for MSK; zero-ops streaming delivery to S3data-delivery-for-general-purpose-s3.md
Streaming Tables / Data Delivery CloudWatch metrics and alarms, DLQ errors, failed deliveries, channel state transitions, freshness lagstreaming-tables-troubleshooting.md
"Can I use Streaming Tables / Data Delivery on MSK Serverless / Standard brokers?" — eligibility routingstreaming-tables.md (answer is always: Express brokers only, use Firehose, Flink, or Kafka Connect for Standard and Serqverless - Firehose integration for Amazon MSK)
What are the current supported Kafka versions for MSK?Supported Apache Kafka versions
Does MSK support KRaft clusters, and how do I migrate between ZooKeeper and KRaft mode clusters?zk-to-kraft-migration.md
What are the current quotas for MSK Express (ingress, egress, partitions, broker count, etc.)?MSK Express Quotas
What are the current quotas for MSK Standard (partitions, broker count, etc.)?MSK Standard Quotas, and MSK Standard best practices for partition count limits
What broker-level configuration changes can I make on MSK Express or Standard brokers?MSK Configuration

Available scripts

  • scripts/msk_sizing.py — MUST be run for any sizing question (broker count, instance choice, cost). Prices from the live AWS Pricing API when AWS credentials with pricing:GetProducts are available, and falls back to an embedded us-east-1 snapshot when they are not, so it runs with or without credentials. See size-and-choose-cluster.md for the required workflow and script reference.

Guardrail — where this skill's own files live (MCP vs local install)

This skill can be loaded two ways, and they resolve the skill's own bundled files — the references/ documents and the scripts/ files from different places. Determine how the skill was loaded before you read a reference or run a script:

  • Loaded through the AWS MCP retrieve_skill tool call. The skill is not installed on the local filesystem; its reference files and scripts do not exist on disk. You MUST fetch each reference or script through the same retrieve_skill tool by passing the file parameter (for example, file="references/configure-clients.md" or file="scripts/msk_sizing.py"), and run a script from the content that tool returns. Do NOT file_read these paths from the local or working directory, and do NOT search the filesystem for them — they are not there, and any local file that happens to match the name is unrelated to this skill.
  • Installed locally (the skill lives in a local skills directory such as .claude/skills/managing-amazon-msk/, ~/.claude/skills/managing-amazon-msk/, or .kiro/skills/managing-amazon-msk/). Read references and run scripts from the local skill directory using the relative paths shown throughout this documentation.

This distinction applies only to the skill's own packaged files. Every artifact created during a session or supplied by users are read from and written to the user's working directory regardless of how the skill was loaded. Never fetch or write customer data through retrieve_skill.

Common Workflows

Create/apply Amazon MSK configurations and set custom domain names — creating an Amazon MSK configuration (server.properties with the fileb:// real-newline requirement), applying it with update-cluster-configuration, and setting broker custom domain names via custom.advertised.listeners: see configure-cluster.md. For the NLB/certificate/DNS connectivity that fronts a custom domain, see configure-clients.md.

FAQ

What does the managing-amazon-msk skill do?

Operates Amazon MSK Provisioned clusters (Standard and Express brokers). Required for ANY MSK Provisioned task — training data conflates Standard and Express. Covers performance, consumer lag, storage, traffic shaping; sizing Standard vs Express; Kafka client tuning; CloudWatch alarms; cluster configs; maintenance, patching, rolling restarts; topic management; MSK Replicator setup for DR and active-active/active-passive replication (same-/cross-account), including throughput and partition sizing; Streaming Tables for S3 Tables and Data Delivery for General Purpose S3 — setup, IAM, monitoring. Prefer Flink for Kafka Iceberg sink questions. Migrations: use migrate-to-msk. Triggers: MSK Provisioned, Kafka, kafka./express. types, AWS/Kafka namespace, cross-cluster replication, Kafka to Iceberg on S3 Tables, Kafka to S3, lakehouse, data lake from Kafka, Kafka Connect S3 Sink or Firehose alternative. DO NOT USE for MSK Connect — search docs instead. Serverless: only S3 Tables/data deli

How do I install managing-amazon-msk?

Run npx skills add https://github.com/aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws --skill managing-amazon-msk in your project. The skills CLI detects the agents you use and copies the skill into the right folder. For Claude Code you can also place the skill folder at ~/.claude/skills/managing-amazon-msk/ (personal) or .claude/skills/managing-amazon-msk/ (project).

Which AI agents can use managing-amazon-msk?

Any agent that supports the open Agent Skills format (a folder with a SKILL.md file), including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, Cline, OpenCode and more.

Is managing-amazon-msk safe to install?

Security partners have reviewed it: Gen Agent Trust Hub passed; Socket passed; Snyk passed. As with any skill, read the SKILL.md and bundled scripts before installing.

Who maintains managing-amazon-msk?

It is published by aws in aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws, and it is an official skill from the maker of the technology it covers. It has 5,116 recorded installs.

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