Size Apache Kafka via Confluent Platform on Azure

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

Monthly cost

$3,128.64

Annual cost

$37,544/year

Line-item breakdown

Compute	$2,312.64
Storage	$816.00
Other	$0.00

Components provisioned

Role	Instance	vCPU	GB RAM	Storage
Broker	3 × Standard_D16s_v5	16	64	2 TB
Kraft Controller	3 × Standard_D2s_v5	2	8	100 GB
Connect	2 × Standard_D2s_v5	2	8	50 GB
Schema Registry	2 × Standard_D2s_v5	2	8	50 GB
Control Center	1 × Standard_D4s_v5	4	16	300 GB

Why this sizing

This Extra Small Kafka deployment supports up to 50 MB/s ingress with short retention, suitable for departmental use cases. Compute instances, specifically the 3x Standard_D16s_v5 brokers, are the primary cost driver, accounting for over 70% of the total monthly expenditure. The architecture prioritizes a minimal footprint by disabling high availability, which significantly reduces cost but introduces a single point of failure. The 2000 GB SSDs on the brokers provide ample storage for the specified short retention windows.

Export

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Google Cloud Terraform baseline

Terraform export is available for Google Cloud at launch. AWS and Azure are deferred to v1.5.

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: Azure pricing snapshot, retrieved May 6, 2026.

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