Connect Migration Utility: Convert Self-Managed Connectors to Fully Managed in a Few Minutes

Migrating from self-managed Apache Kafka® connectors to fully managed connectors has been a persistent challenge for data teams working on Confluent Cloud. While Confluent-managed connectors deliver enterprise-grade features, seamless upgrades, and comprehensive support that add up to significant development and operations cost savings, the journey to get there often feels daunting and opaque.

Organizations may face fragmented processes, uncertain migration feasibility, and manual audits as well as potentially days of hands-on work for each connector—resources that could be better spent innovating rather than simply maintaining pipelines. Confluent’s new Connect migration utility is built to change this paradigm.

The utility was designed and developed from a simple but ambitious vision: Provide an intuitive, end-to-end migration experience that lets users move confidently from self-managed Kafka connectors to their fully managed Confluent counterparts and closer to a truly cloud-native data platform, regardless of technical complexity or organizational scale. In this post, we’ll explore the vision behind the utility, its core capabilities, and why this tool is a game-changer for Kafka teams.

The Strategic Value of Fully Managed Connectors

Before diving deep into the core capabilities of the Connect migration utility, let’s understand the core value of fully managed connectors: enabling the strategic shift of moving your team's focus from infrastructure management to innovation.

While Apache Kafka is a powerful tool for data streaming, managing the Kafka Connect framework, including deploying, monitoring, scaling, and securing the connectors, is a significant operational burden. This undifferentiated ops work consumes valuable engineering resources that could be spent building revenue-generating applications and deriving business insights. A fully managed service abstracts away all this complexity, handling the entire life cycle of the connectors and the underlying infrastructure.

With fully managed connectors, you can integrate new data sources and sinks in minutes, not weeks, drastically reducing the time to value for your projects. And you gain the peace of mind that comes with a highly available, scalable, and secure data pipeline maintained by experts. By offloading the operational responsibility, you empower your team to focus on what truly matters: leveraging real-time data to drive your business forward.

The Hidden Headaches of Kafka Connector Migrations

While customers are eager to switch to fully managed connectors, their paths are often filled with obstacles.

• Opaque Connector Landscapes: Teams often don’t know which connectors their organizations are running, how many can migrate seamlessly, or which ones will hit roadblocks. Even determining basic inventories can require intense manual labor or risky guesswork.

• Fragmented, Manual Processes: Discovery, compatibility checks, and connector creation are split across scripts and spreadsheets. Engineers must pore over property lists and transformation settings connector by connector.

• Config Mapping Nightmares: Converting self-managed configs into fully managed equivalents is error-prone and time-consuming. Custom single message transforms (SMTs) and authentication schemes often require complete rewrites.

• Uncertainty and Risk: Without automated feasibility checks and configuration mapping, teams fear production downtime and data inconsistencies. There’s a constant risk that a migrated connector won’t mirror the performance or reliability of its predecessor.

• Resource Drain: Instead of building business-critical features, data engineers spend precious time tinkering with upgrades, doing cluster provisioning, and troubleshooting operational issues on aging connectors.

• Manual Cutover to Production: Once migrated, teams still struggle to validate performance parity as metrics tracking and offset matching are all do-it-yourself.

Collectively, these pain points incentivize teams to stay on self-managed connectors long after fully managed options are available, causing them to lose out on enterprise support, streamlined upgrades, and the benefits of cloud-native agility.

Connect Migration Utility: Your Turnkey Toolkit for Seamless Migrations

The Connect migration utility is an open source, CLI-based tool that’s free to use and available via GitHub. Customers pay for resulting fully managed connector usage only when cutover is complete.

Let’s break down the phased migration workflow enabled by the Connect migration utility, along with key features and how it works.

1. Discovery: Customers supply minimal input—usually a list of Connect worker node URLs. The utility extracts metadata about each self-managed connector: versions, authentication setups, configuration properties, SMTs, and key metrics. Sensitive information is redacted for security, and results are delivered in a clear summary.

2. Feasibility Analysis: Using the discovery output, the tool analyzes migration readiness for each connector. Are all connector types available as fully managed? Is authentication supported as is, or are changes required? Are special properties, configurations, SMTs, or metrics unsupported? The feasibility report categorizes connectors with statuses such as "Fully Supported," "Partially Supported," or "Unavailable" and recommends actions.

3. Configuration Mapping: Where migration is possible, the utility maps all relevant self-managed connector settings to their fully managed equivalents. This includes basic configuration properties, out-of-the-box SMTs, and guidance for any customizations that require manual adjustment.

4. Setup and Creation: Customers can use the generated fully managed configs to provision new connectors directly in Confluent Cloud. The utility also streamlines setup by handling configuration aliasing (so post-migration automation becomes seamless) and verifying prerequisites like networking, authentication, and role-based access control (RBAC).

5. Validation: Once provisioned, the planned validation features will compare performance and data correctness between source and managed connectors, using metrics such as latency, throughput, lag, and error rates. This step is critical for customer trust before decommissioning the original connector.

6. Cutover and Deployment: Teams can proceed to production use of the fully managed connectors, with the option to automate a switchover that stops self-managed connectors and restarts fully managed connectors at the latest offset—reducing downtime and risk.

From Months to Minutes: How the Migration Utility Powers Business Transformation

The Connect migration utility transforms complex migrations from a multi-day or multi-week endeavor into a process that takes just hours or minutes, eliminating laborious audits and configuration rewrites. 

It provides a risk-free migration path through automated validation and feasibility reports, giving teams the confidence to proceed without the fear of broken cutovers or lost data. With intelligent planning features, teams can use the utility to perform comprehensive discovery—so they can understand exactly which connectors are ready for migration, identify any existing blockers, and prioritize their efforts for maximum business impact. 

This utility allows organizations to modernize at their own pace, offering flexible modes for gradual, staged, or bulk updates to suit specific business priorities. Ultimately, by simplifying the migration journey, the tool helps free up engineers from infrastructure maintenance and allows them to unlock cloud-native innovation, take advantage of enterprise-grade support, and benefit from regular upgrades and best-in-class reliability.

Simplify Your Connector Migration Journey

The Connect migration utility is a major milestone for the Confluent connector suite, turning connector migration from a dreaded operational chore into a fast, transparent, and empowering self-service experience. By dramatically simplifying discovery, mapping, feasibility, and validation, Confluent enables organizations to confidently make the leap to fully managed connectors and unlock the full benefits of modern, cloud-native data integration. 

Our future roadmap includes extended validation features, automated downtime handling for cutover, and richer metrics analysis. As feedback from customers and internal teams grows, the utility will evolve to address more edge cases and streamline even the most complex migrations. If your team is stuck maintaining self-managed Kafka connectors—or simply wants to save days or weeks on migration overhead—it’s time to try the Connect migration utility. 

Ready to kick-start your migration journey? Explore the Connect migration utility today! 

• Download the utility from GitHub, scan your existing setup, and join the new era of effortless connector migration.

• Reach out to the Confluent team for onboarding support or best practice migration playbooks.

• Try our fully managed connectors now!

The preceding outlines our general product direction and is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality. The development, release, timing, and pricing of any features or functionality described may change. Customers should make their purchase decisions based on services, features, and functions that are currently available.

Confluent and associated marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Confluent, Inc.

Apache®, Apache Kafka®, Kafka®, Apache Flink®, and Flink® are either registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. No endorsement by the Apache Software Foundation is implied by using these marks. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.