---
title: "Supported serialization formats for Aerospike Kafka source (outbound) connector"
description: "Supported serialization formats for the Aerospike Kafka Source (Outbound) Connector, including Avro and JSON."
---

# Supported serialization formats for Aerospike Kafka source (outbound) connector

> For the complete documentation index see: [llms.txt](https://aerospike.com/docs/llms.txt)
> 
> All documentation pages available in markdown.

The Aerospike Kafka Source (Outbound) Connector consumes the Aerospike records that are sent to it by Aerospike’s change-notification system. The connector then transforms the records into one of these formats, and the records are consumed by downstream Kafka applications.

The following message serialization formats are currently supported:

-   [Avro](https://aerospike.com/docs/connectors/streaming/kafka/outbound/formats/avro-serialization-format): Avro standard format.
-   [Kafka Avro](https://aerospike.com/docs/connectors/streaming/kafka/outbound/formats/kafka-avro-serialization-format): An Avro format specifically for sending messages to Apache Kafka.
-   [Flat JSON](https://aerospike.com/docs/connectors/streaming/kafka/outbound/formats/flat-json-serialization-format): A simple JSON format which does not include type information for fields.
-   [JSON](https://aerospike.com/docs/connectors/streaming/kafka/outbound/formats/json-serialization-format): A more complex JSON format which allows metadata, such as type information for fields.
-   [MessagePack](https://aerospike.com/docs/connectors/streaming/kafka/outbound/formats/messagepack-serialization-format): Standard, binary, [MessagePack](https://msgpack.org) format.
-   [Custom Format](https://aerospike.com/docs/connectors/streaming/common/outbound-message-transformer#format-transformer): Format with custom user code.