# Amazon MSK

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/streaming/aws-msk/

Managed Kafka on AWS, whose serverless tier meters five separate dimensions at once — cluster-hours, partition-hours, data in, data out and storage.

## Who it suits

You are already on AWS and want Kafka inside the same IAM, the same VPC and the same bill. Serverless scales partitions for you and states no maximum retention at all, which nothing else here offers.

Consider something else if You want to predict the bill. Five meters run at once and the floor is $0.75 per cluster-hour — about $547 a month before a byte moves. Ingress costs twice egress, the reverse of most of this corpus, and the 2,400-partition ceiling costs about $2.65 a day carrying no traffic.

## iScore

49 / 100 (80% interval 37–61), rank 4 of 4 in streaming.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every streaming peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/streaming/aws-msk/alternatives/

- Price: 37 (19–55), weight 36%, 3 of 6 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: free_card_required, free_offer_type, free_tier
- Capacity and limits: 31 (8–53), weight 29%, 1 of 1 criteria scored
- Trust and compliance: 61 (24–98), weight 21%, 0 of 4 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: audit_logs, rbac, sso_saml, uptime_sla
- Evidence: 96 (96–96), weight 14%, 4 of 4 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Entry paid plan: $0.75 per cluster-hour on Serverless — about $547 a month for a cluster that has moved no data at all, before partitions, transfer or storage are counted. ([source](https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AmazonMSK/current/us-east-1/index.json), read 2026-09-16)
- Pricing model: Serverless bills FIVE dimensions simultaneously: $0.75 per cluster-hour, $0.0015 per partition-hour, $0.10 per GB in, $0.05 per GB out and $0.10 per GB-month stored. Provisioned clusters swap the first two for a per-broker hourly rate. Nothing here is a single number. ([source](https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AmazonMSK/current/us-east-1/index.json), read 2026-09-16)
- Egress over allowance: $0.05 per GB out and $0.10 per GB in on Serverless. Ingress costs twice egress here, which is the reverse of most of this site's corpus. ([source](https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AmazonMSK/current/us-east-1/index.json), read 2026-09-16)

### Storage

- Storage price: $0.10 per GB-month on Serverless. ([source](https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AmazonMSK/current/us-east-1/index.json), read 2026-09-16)

### Queues

- Maximum message size: 8 MiB on Serverless. A larger message fails outright with INVALID_REQUEST rather than being throttled. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/msk/latest/developerguide/limits.html), read 2026-09-16)
- Message retention: Unlimited. Serverless states no maximum retention duration, where WarpStream's published configuration is seven days. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/msk/latest/developerguide/limits.html), read 2026-09-16)

### Streaming

- Throughput ceiling: 200 Mbps ingress and 400 Mbps egress per Serverless cluster, throttled rather than refused. That is 25 MB/s in — a quarter of what Redpanda Serverless states, once the units are read. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/msk/latest/developerguide/limits.html), read 2026-09-16)
- Partition limit: 2,400 partition leaders per Serverless cluster for non-compacted topics, and 120 for compacted ones. Partitions are metered as well as capped — $0.0015 per partition-hour, so 2,400 of them cost about $2.65 a day carrying no traffic. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/msk/latest/developerguide/limits.html), read 2026-09-16)

## Compared with

- [Amazon MSK vs Confluent Cloud](https://inetgeek.com/compare/confluent-cloud-vs-aws-msk/)
- [Amazon MSK vs WarpStream](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aws-msk-vs-warpstream/)
- [Amazon MSK vs Redpanda](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aws-msk-vs-redpanda/)