I've never personally used this stuff. The last message broker I used was a proprietary one at a company. However, a quick search on metacpan reveals the following modules:

• Kafka::Consumer::Avro
• Kafka::Producer::Avro

Now that I have stated the obvious it gives me the opportunity to tell you that Perl message broker solutions exist. I found one called Mercury that says all you need is Perl installed to run it (though the last release seems to have been a few years back...).

The Kafka server appears to be downloadable. Have you tried to install the server locally and try to configure it to use perhaps some generic, locally created SSL certificates? I would then try my solution against the local server to gain familiarity with it prior to using a hosted/cloud-based server when first getting started because it will kick out great error messages and hints that might be obscured by the provider.