Built a shared Kafka platform that IT and other application teams plug their own apps into, instead of each team running its own broker.

• 3-broker cluster in KRaft mode (no ZooKeeper), replication factor 3, every node running broker, controller, and JMX exporter

• Separate tooling VM with AKHQ for topic and consumer lag inspection, Prometheus scraping broker JMX metrics, Grafana dashboards, and Redis for consumer services

• nginx reverse proxy in front of all admin UIs

• Specified broker sizing (4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 50 GB OS + 300 GB data, RHEL 8.10, non-root) and the full port and firewall plan