While it may not be a daunting task to set up Kafka on a local machine or within a particular network and produce/consume messages, people do face challenges when they try to make it work across the network.
Let’s consider a hybrid scenario where your software solution is distributed across two different platforms (say AWS and Azure or on-premise and Azure), and there is a need to route messages from Kafka cluster hosted on one platform to the one hosted on another. This could be a valid business scenario wherein you are trying to consolidate your solution with one cloud platform, and in the interim, you need to have this routing in place till you complete your migration. Even in the long term, there may be a need to maintain solution across multiple platforms for various business and technical reasons.