At Current 2026, I realized that nobody knows exactly what a Kafka proxy can do. Most engineers and architects think it's just some kind of reverse-proxy for Kafka (think nginx) to do routing and used to bridge a legacy or non-native client to the cluster. That's not it. It's barely the start of it. Encryption For instance, an engineer at a UK building society had a hard requirement: encrypt personally identifiable fields before they ever hit Kafka: emails, national insurance numbers, that kind