Amazon EventBridge (formerly CloudWatch Events) versus Amazon MSK

05 Mar 2026

Learn how Amazon EventBridge (formerly CloudWatch Events) differs from Amazon MSK.

	Amazon EventBridge (formerly CloudWatch Events)	Amazon MSK
Scaling	not disclosed (default soft limit depends on region; e.g., 10,000 msg/sec in eu-west-1)	30 brokers per cluster; you need add/remove brokers and reassign partitions manually
Max. message size	256 KB	configurable (default 1 MB)
Persistence	archiving is possible	forever (up to 16384 GiB per broker)
Replication	Multi-AZ	Multi-AZ (optional)
Order guarantee	no	within a partition
Delivery guarantee	at least once	up to the consumer
Pricing	per message	per broker hour + provisioned storage
Protocols	AWS Rest API	Kafka protocol
AWS Integrations	Lambda, SQS, SNS, and many more	Lambda
License	AWS only	open source (Apache Kafka)
Encryption at rest	yes	yes
Encryption in transit	yes	yes

Further reading