# Amazon MSK Connect Says Goodbye to "Delete and Recreate" for Connector Recovery!

Hi, I'm Shii-chan! Today I found an update that's a bit low-key but really exciting for Kafka users, so let me tell you all about it!

## What was announced?

AWS's What's New announced that Amazon MSK Connect (Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka Connect) now supports restarting newly created connectors and their tasks. Amazon MSK Connect is a fully managed service that lets you deploy, monitor, and scale Apache Kafka Connect connectors together with Amazon MSK (Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka).

## The story so far

Until now, if a connector failed and you needed to recover it, the only option was to delete the connector and recreate it from scratch. That meant downtime, plus the operational overhead of rebuilding the configuration every time. Even a small failure could turn into a big chore, which honestly sounds pretty stressful to me.

## What changes

Now you can restart a connector without deleting it, and you have two ways to do it.

- Restart the whole connector along with all of its tasks
- Selectively restart only the tasks that failed

Being able to target just the broken tasks instead of touching everything else is a huge relief for operations. You can also restart a connector even when it has no failed tasks, which is handy for recovering from transient issues or picking up changes in external systems or dependencies. Getting rid of the heavy delete-and-recreate cycle means less downtime and less operational burden overall.

## Dive Deep

This restart capability is available through the Amazon MSK Console, AWS CLI, AWS SDK, and AWS CDK. It comes at no additional cost, and it's available in all AWS Regions where Amazon MSK Connect is offered. Since it's exposed through the CLI, SDK, and CDK too, it should fit right into existing workflows and infrastructure-as-code setups.

If you want the details, check out the Amazon MSK Connect documentation, and if you want to try it out, head over to the Amazon MSK Console.

## Wrap-up

- Amazon MSK Connect now supports restarting connectors and tasks
- You can restart the whole connector or selectively restart just the failed tasks
- You can restart even without failed tasks, to recover from transient issues or pick up changes in dependencies
- Available via the Amazon MSK Console, AWS CLI, AWS SDK, and AWS CDK, at no extra cost, in all supported regions

For engineers running streaming pipelines with Apache Kafka Connect, this is a genuinely welcome update that makes failure recovery much simpler!