Export from Alibaba Cloud to Kafka

CloudQuery is an open-source data integration platform that allows you to export data from any source to any destination.

The CloudQuery Alibaba Cloud plugin allows you to sync data from Alibaba Cloud to any destination, including Kafka. It's free, open source, requires no account, and takes only minutes to get started.

Ready? Let's dive right in!

Step 1. Install the CloudQuery CLI

The CloudQuery CLI is a command-line tool that runs the sync. It supports MacOS, Linux and Windows.

brew install cloudquery/tap/cloudquery

Step 2. Configure the Alibaba Cloud source plugin

Create a configuration file for the Alibaba Cloud plugin and set up authentication.

Configuration

Create a file called alicloud.yaml and add the following contents:

kind: source
spec:
  name: "alicloud"
  path: "cloudquery/alicloud"
  version: "v2.1.1"
  tables: ["*"]
  destinations: ["kafka"]
  spec:
    accounts:
      - name: my_account
        regions:
        - cn-hangzhou
        - cn-beijing
        - eu-west-1
        - us-west-1
        # ...
        access_key: ${ALICLOUD_ACCESS_KEY}
        secret_key: ${ALICLOUD_SECRET_KEY}

Fine-tune this configuration to match your needs. For more information, see the Alibaba Cloud Plugin ↗ page in the docs.

Authentication

Authentication is done via access keys. See Obtain an AccessKey pair (opens in a new tab) for more information.

It is highly recommended that you use environment variable expansion to store your access key pair. For example, you can set the following environment variables:

ALICLOUD_ACCESS_KEY - The access key ID.
ALICLOUD_SECRET_KEY - The access key secret.

And then use them in the configuration as follows:

access_key: ${ALICLOUD_ACCESS_KEY}
secret_key: ${ALICLOUD_SECRET_KEY}

Step 3. Configure the Kafka destination plugin

Create a configuration file for the Kafka plugin and set up authentication.

Configuration

Create a file called kafka.yaml and add the following contents:

This example configures connects to a Kafka destination with no authentication and pushes messages in JSON format. Note that the plugin only supports append write-mode.

The (top level) spec section is described in the Destination Spec Reference.

kind: destination
spec:
  name: "kafka"
  path: "cloudquery/kafka"
  version: "v3.0.1"
  write_mode: "append" # only supports 'append'

  spec:
    brokers: ["<broker-host>:<broker-port>"]
    format: "json"

Fine-tune this configuration to match your needs. For more information, see the Kafka Plugin ↗ page in the docs.

Step 4. Start the Sync

Run the following command in your terminal to start the sync

cloudquery sync alicloud.yaml kafka.yaml

And away we go! 🚀 The sync will run until completion, fetching all selected tables from Alibaba Cloud. Any errors will be logged to a file called cloudquery.log.

Export from Alibaba Cloud to Kafka

Step 1. Install the CloudQuery CLI

Step 2. Configure the Alibaba Cloud source plugin

Configuration

Authentication

Step 3. Configure the Kafka destination plugin

Configuration

Step 4. Start the Sync

Further Reading