Size Apache Kafka via Confluent Platform on AWS

Extra Small — up to 50 MB/s ingress with short retention windows

Monthly cost

$2,856.64

Annual cost

$34,280/year

Line-item breakdown

Compute	$2,312.64
Storage	$544.00
Other	$0.00

Components provisioned

Role	Instance	vCPU	GB RAM	Storage
Broker	3 × m6i.4xlarge	16	64	2 TB
Kraft Controller	3 × m6i.large	2	8	100 GB
Connect	2 × m6i.large	2	8	50 GB
Schema Registry	2 × m6i.large	2	8	50 GB
Control Center	1 × m6i.xlarge	4	16	300 GB

Why this sizing

This Extra Small Confluent Platform deployment supports up to 50 MB/s ingress with short retention, utilizing a total of 60 vCPU and 192 GB RAM across 11 instances. Compute is the dominant cost driver, accounting for over 80% of the $2856.64 monthly total. The architecture provisions 3 large m6i instances for Kafka brokers, but also includes 8 smaller instances for other Confluent components, reflecting a distributed system design even at this entry-level scale.

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Sources

Reference architecture: Apache Kafka via Confluent Platform for departmental-cluster, version Confluent Platform current self-managed deployment guidance, retrieved April 13, 2026.

https://docs.confluent.io/platform/current/kafka/deployment.html

Pricing: AWS pricing snapshot, retrieved May 6, 2026.

Commercial pricing only. GovCloud, sovereign cloud, and discounts beyond those shown are not modelled.