>>pul+(OP)
Kafka is awesome, but I have one major gripe with it. It gives a solid interface to JVM applications. But if your application is outside of the JVM and you want it to consume from a topic, it's a terrible experience.
>>beebma+3Cb
I have found clients based on librdkafka [1] or sarama [2] to be pretty robust and capable. For SSL, librdkafka relies heavily on OpenSSL which can cause a few headaches IME. But the rest is straightforward.