Amazon MSK is a fully managed service that:
- Runs Apache Kafka under the hood (no proprietary fork).
- Manages infrastructure, provisioning, and patching.
- Handles cluster setup, scaling, and monitoring.
- Provides integrations with AWS IAM, VPC, CloudWatch, etc.
It’s still Kafka, but:
You don’t have to install it, configure brokers, or manage Zookeeper (or KRaft, Kafka’s newer internal metadata system).