Question: How to consume protobuf messages with Kafka in MDM

Our current implementation of MDM (15.4) consumes XML-based messages over JMS.  Our organization is migrating from JMS in favor of Kafka and is standardizing on the protobuf format for messages.

While we’re able to get a Kafka stream consumer to connect to a Kafka Confluent topic and consume basic test messages, and it’s clear we can set a property to use the appropriate Kafka deserializer, there doesn’t seem to be a way to configure the Kafka stream source input to expect protobuf (only String or Avro).  Also it’s not clear how we would refer to an object in our stream consumer component (which currently parses basic XML string input).

Is there a resource out there that might shed some light on how a Kafka with protobuf implementation might look?  It seems like we might need to integrate a custom module or something along those lines into the stream consumer flow to help facilitate this, but we’re not sure where to start or if there’s already a precedent for this.