Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Confluent Cloud

Access Control Lists (ACLs) provide secure access to your Confluent Cloud Kafka data.

Important

Anyone with access to Confluent Cloud web browser has full access to all resources (which is the same as having super user access).

Also, Confluent Cloud ACLs are similar to Kafka ACLs (except for the CLI commands). Before attempting to create and use ACLs, you should familiarize yourself with ACL concepts. Doing so can help you avoid common pitfalls that can occur when creating and using ACLs to manage access to components and cluster data.

The operations available to a user depend on the resources to which a user has access. When defining an ACL, you should consider which resources your users or groups have access to, and the available operations when managing those resources. For example, you might have to define more than a single ACL, depending on the resources that specific users require access to.

Note that the Confluent Cloud ACL resources and operations listed here are a subset of the Kafka ACL resources and operations.

Resource Operation
Cluster
  • Create (allows creating topics)
  • Describe: number of brokers, other meta-data
  • IdempotentWrite: for producers in Idempotent mode, InitProducerId(idempotent): To initialize the producer
  • Alter (CreateAcls, DeleteAcls, DescribeConfigs)
Consumer Groups
  • Delete
  • Describe
  • Read
Topic
  • Alter
  • AlterConfigs
  • Create
  • Delete
  • Describe (for example, number of partitions)
  • DescribeConfigs
  • Read
  • Write
TransactionalID
  • Describe
  • Write

Confluent Cloud does not support IP or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) whitelisting, where all entities are denied access except those included in the whitelist.

Use of wildcards and prefix matching make Kafka ACLs much easier to use than having to fully specify every topic or resource. For more details, refer to Prefixed ACLs.

ACLs are managed using the Confluent Cloud CLI. For a complete list of Kafka ACLs, see Authorization using ACLs.

See also