KNetOPC

KNetOPC is a production-ready OPC-UA suite that connects industrial systems to Apache Kafka™ and the full .NET ecosystem through a standards-based, bi-directional architecture.

Built on Kafka Connect and the OPC Foundation SDK, KNetOPC provides everything needed to integrate OT infrastructure with enterprise and cloud platforms — without custom transport code, without protocol adapters, and without lock-in.

Bi-directional OT/IT integration, out of the box

The Source Connector subscribes to any OPC-UA server and streams change notifications into Kafka topics in real time — ready for analytics, monitoring, machine learning, event-driven architectures, and digital twin platforms.

The Sink Connector completes the loop: it receives commands from Kafka, executes them on the OPC-UA server — Read, Write, Call, Browse, and more — and publishes the results back to a response topic. Combined with the MASES.KNet.OPC.Client library, this exposes a full OPC-UA ISessionClient implementation over Kafka, making the transport entirely transparent. Any OPC-UA extension or companion specification that accepts ISessionClient works without modification.

Native .NET client library

MASES.KNet.OPC.Client provides two complementary classes that mirror the connector architecture:

• KNetOPCSinkClient — implements ISessionClient with Kafka as the transport, routing OPC-UA request/response operations through the Sink connector.
• KNetOPCSourceClient — consumes MonitoredItemNotification records from the Source connector topic, delivering live OPC-UA data to the application as a standard .NET event stream.

Together they give .NET applications complete, high-level access to OPC-UA functionality over Kafka — no broker code, no serialization, no consumer management.

EF Core integration for industrial data

Through KEFCore — the Entity Framework Core provider for Apache Kafka™ — KNetOPC makes OPC-UA data directly queryable using DbContext, LINQ, and strongly-typed entities. Schema-aware transformations convert OPC-UA notifications into KEFCore records automatically. With SignalR integration, the same pipeline can feed live dashboards and real-time UIs with no additional middleware.

Built for scale and security

KNetOPC is compatible with any Kafka-protocol broker — Apache Kafka™, Confluent, Redpanda, Amazon MSK, Aiven, and others — and supports all standard Kafka Connect deployment models. SSL/TLS, SASL, and transactional producers are supported out of the box. The JVM and CLR run in the same process, insulated from each other via JNI, inheriting the security posture of both runtimes with no code injection and no extra network hop.