Anshul Sharma and Ramachandran G do a bit of converting:
Kafka is increasingly become a popular choice of scalable message queueing for large data processing workloads. This makes it very popular in IoT based ecosystem where there is large ingress in data before data processing (or) data storage. Azure Data Explorer is a very powerful time series and analytics database that suits IoT scale data ingestion and data querying.
Kafka supports ingestion of data in multiple formats including JSON, Avro, Protobuf and String. ADX supports ingestion of data from Kafka into ADX in all these formats. Due to excellent schema support, extensibility to various platforms and compression, [protobuf](https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers) is increasingly becoming a data exchange choice in IoT based systems. The ADX Kafka sink connector leverages the Kafka Connect framework and provides an adapter to ingest data from Kafka in all these formats.
The following section aims to provide configuration to support ingestion of protobuf data from Kafka to ADX.
Click through for the high-level architecture and a deeper dive into the process.