Using IBM Event Streams as your Kafka provider

You can choose IBM® Event Streams as your Apache Kafka provider. The default configuration secures communications to the Kafka brokers with SSL and with authentication based on an API key.

About this task

After IBM Event Streams is installed, to configure it for IBM Business Automation Insights, you retrieve Kafka bootstrap server URLs, download the Kafka server certificate and truststore for the SSL connection, and generate the connection API key. Detailed instructions for the steps below are provided in the Securing the connection page of the IBM Event Streams documentation.

Procedure

From the IBM Cloud Private catalog, install the IBM Event Streams product.
Retrieve the Kafka bootstrap server URLs.
Use token as the Kafka Username parameter.
From the IBM Cloud Private management console, generate an API key for the Kafka Password value.
For IBM Business Automation Insights, the Operator IBM Event Streams role (or higher) is required to read and write to Kafka topics.
For the Kafka Server certificate, retrieve the PEM certificate file.
The PEM certificate file must be converted to base64. For example:
```
base64
    <es-cert.pem>
```
Download the Java truststore that contains the broker certificate, which you will use later to configure event emitters.
For more information about event emitter security, see Securing communications from event emitters to Kafka.