Amazon MSK Connect adds in-place connector pause and resume

Amazon MSK Connect now lets engineers pause a running connector and resume it in place, AWS announced on October 22, 2026. AWS identifies source-database maintenance, sink-target maintenance and investigation of upstream or downstream problems as uses for the capability.

What survives a pause

According to the launch announcement, a paused connector retains its configuration, capacity settings and committed offsets. When resumed, its tasks continue processing from the offsets they last committed.

AWS says the previous approach required deleting and recreating the connector, adding operational overhead and risk. The practical change is therefore a separation between temporarily stopping processing and replacing the connector: maintenance runbooks can use pause/resume without a teardown-and-recreation step.

Retaining capacity settings should not be confused with a statement about billing or resource allocation while paused; the announcement does not explain those details.

Plan for recovery, not just the stop

The documented restart point is the last committed offset. For sensitive pipelines, verify connector-specific delivery semantics, retry behavior and duplicate handling separately rather than treating pause/resume as an application-level transaction boundary.

If upstream systems will keep producing data during the interruption, include recovery checks in the maintenance plan:

• Check whether source retention can cover the planned pause and subsequent catch-up period.
• Define how to assess backlog and freshness after resuming.
• Monitor downstream load during recovery rather than treating a successful resume as the end of the maintenance window.

These are planning considerations, not additional delivery or recovery guarantees from the launch announcement.

Availability and pricing

AWS says pause and resume are available in all AWS Regions where Amazon MSK Connect is available, through the Amazon MSK Console, AWS CLI, AWS SDK and AWS CDK.

The capability is offered at no additional cost, according to the announcement. That is a feature-pricing statement, not a promise of zero charges while a connector is paused. The announcement does not specify paused-connector billing behavior.