I just tried this with HDP 2.5.3 + Ambari 2.4.2, for the SASL_SSL example, I had to make a couple of changes to get it to work. For producer, When I tried the example able, I got "new-producer is not a recognized option" I had to create a ssl properties file (I called mine /tmp/kakfka.ssl.properties) then run producer as: /usr/hdp/current/kafka-broker/bin/kafka-console-producer.sh --broker-list kafka-node1.domain:6668,kafka-node2.domain:6668 -topic test --producer.config /tmp/kakfka.ssl.properties --security-protocol SASL_SSL Similarly for consumer, I had to add a reference to the ssl.properties file: I used this: /usr/hdp/current/kafka-broker/bin/kafka-console-consumer.sh --consumer.config /tmp/kakfka.ssl.properties -bootstrap-server kafka-node1.domain:6668,kafka-node2.domain:6668 --topic test --from-beginning --security-protocol SASL_SSL --new-consumer ... View more