How can I stay in Kafka cluster? I have to transform a data from kafka topic A and then publish it in topic B. What are the way to achieve it?

It's been a couple of weeks since I started learning Kafka. So, looking for small doubts as blogs and videos don't answer. I have to write an API which should read data (raw text) from Kafka Topic-A, and transform the data (in json) and then publish it in Kafka Topic-B.

What is the best way to achieve it?

I can try writing a simple API and deploy it (say ECS/EKS) outside of the Kafka cluster. While, data is in Kafka cluster. So, API will poll the data from Kafka cluster to EKS cluster for transformation and then send it back into Kafka cluster. I believe this will introduce some kind of latency and it should not be a recommended way.

Second thought I had to have a Kafka transformer connector. This way, I'll remain in Kafka cluster but I think there maybe some security concerns.

I can write Kafka Streams, but this will be deployed as a separate API outside of the Kafka cluster, I guess.

Looking forward to suggestions here.