Expand a Dedicated Kafka Cluster in Confluent Cloud

This topic shows you how to expand an existing Dedicated Apache Kafka® cluster. Cluster expansion allows you to seamlessly scale your cluster to meet your streaming needs.

When you scale a Dedicated Kafka cluster, Confluent adds brokers and rebalances the cluster to ensure a balanced load across the brokers.

Prerequisite

  1. Select your Confluent Cloud cluster.

    Confluent Cluster web UI

  2. Click the Cluster Settings tab and then Capacity.

    Confluent Cluster capacity

  3. View the current usage on your cluster and determine if you are hitting any usage limits. Click Expand capacity, select the expanded CKU capacity for your cluster, and then click Apply changes.

    Important

    Cluster expansion is not reversible.

    Expand Confluent Cluster capacity

  4. Confirm your changes and click Continue.

    Confirm cluster expansion

    Note

    Dedicated Kafka cluster expansion can take up to a few days to complete. During expansion, your applications may see leader elections, but otherwise performance will not suffer. Supported Kafka clients will gracefully handle these changes. You will receive an email when the expansion is complete.