Google Cloud 1 Managed Service for Apache Kafka 129 (generally available since late 2024; it began as "Apache Kafka for BigQuery 1 ") runs open-source Kafka, which its overview page gives as version 3.7.1, behind Google's own sizing model. You do not choose brokers. You give a cluster a number of vCPUs (at least 3) and memory (1-8 GiB per vCPU), and the service creates and replaces brokers across three zones, with three replicas and a minimum of two in sync by default, so a cluster survives the loss of a zone. Clients reach it through Private Service Connect endpoints in your VPC subnets or, since September 2026, optionally over the internet.
Authentication always ties a connection to an identity. With SASL, the principal is an IAM user or service account: OAUTHBEARER with Application Default Credentials is recommended (the same token-callback pattern as MSK Provisioned Clusters, using Google's open-source auth handler), and PLAIN with a service-account key or access token suits tests. Mutual TLS with client certificates is generally available since September 2025. Kafka ACLs work alongside IAM roles. Managed Kafka Connect 129 clusters (generally available since October 2025) offer connectors for BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, MirrorMaker 2 and a Debezium-based PostgreSQL 1,289 source.
Billing is by capacity, in Google's Data Compute Units: a vCPU counts 0.6 DCU and a GiB of memory 0.1, so one vCPU with 4 GiB is 1 DCU, at $0.09 per DCU-hour in Iowa (us-central1), or $0.12 for Connect clusters, with one- and three-year commitments cutting it to $0.072 and $0.054. Storage is billed as 100 GB of local disk per vCPU at $0.000232877 per GiB-hour (about $0.17 a month), plus a lower rate for one replica in long-term tiered storage, and replication across zones costs $0.01 per GiB. The smallest BookNest cluster, 3 vCPUs with 12 GiB, is 3 DCU: about $197 a month in compute and $51 for its 300 GB of local disk, roughly $250.