# Kafka Externalization Using AWS MSK with DR Setup(Active/Passive)

**URL:** <https://forums.pega.com/t/kafka-externalization-using-aws-msk-with-dr-setup-active-passive/13008>\
**Category:** General\
**Tags:** pega-platform\
**Created:** [August 4, 2026, 9:42pm UTC](https://forums.pega.com/t/kafka-externalization-using-aws-msk-with-dr-setup-active-passive/13008 "2026-08-04T21:42:59Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![MadhavaRaoJ](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/50afbb/32.png) [@MadhavaRaoJ](https://forums.pega.com/u/MadhavaRaoJ)\
**Post date:** [August 4, 2026, 9:42pm UTC](https://forums.pega.com/t/kafka-externalization-using-aws-msk-with-dr-setup-active-passive/13008/1 "2026-08-04T21:42:59Z")

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Hi All,

We are currently in the process of externalizing the Pega Stream Service (Kafka) in Pega Platform 23 using **AWS MSK** as the Kafka provider. We have successfully configured and validated connectivity in our non-production environment.

As part of our production architecture, we’re planning an **Active/Passive disaster recovery setup** using **multi-region Amazon MSK clusters** with **MSK Replicator** for cross-region replication.

From my understanding, MSK Replicator synchronizes Kafka topics, consumer groups, and related metadata between clusters. In a typical Active/Passive scenario, replication would run from the primary region to the secondary region. However, after a disaster failover to the secondary region and subsequent failback to the primary region, reverse replication would be required to keep data synchronized.

While reviewing AWS documentation, I found the following statement:

> “MSK Replicator replication is asynchronous, so duplicates can occur during failover/failback events. AWS recommends consumer-side deduplication or idempotent downstream processing.”

Reference: [Build multi-Region resilient Apache Kafka applications with identical topic names using Amazon MSK and Amazon MSK Replicator | AWS Big Data Blog](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/build-multi-region-resilient-apache-kafka-applications-with-identical-topic-names-using-amazon-msk-and-amazon-msk-replicator/)

I have a few questions regarding Pega’s behavior in this type of architecture:

1. **Consumer Offset Management**

2. **Duplicate Message Handling**

3. **Need for Kafka Data Replication**

4. **Offset Mismatch During Failover/Failback**

If anyone has experience running Pega 23 with externalized Kafka/MSK across multiple regions, I’d appreciate hearing about your architecture, lessons learned, or any recommendations from Pega Support/Product Engineering.

Thanks,  
**Madhav**