[rebyn]

I once looked into authen/authorization with Kafka topics and whether one can only be allowed to subscribe to specific ones and came up short with any solution to how to do it with Kafka. From my POV, points: 1 to 4 listed above now have been moved to one single point (Kafka) and its capabilities are a lot limited than those other tools/entrypoints (of data access) mentioned. Have there been new development to Kafka's IAM?

[andyroid]

You could inject a custom authorizer and use something like OPA for fine grained access control. See https://github.com/Bisnode/opa-kafka-plugin for an example.