To publish data from a YugabyteDB database to a Kafka topic using Debezium CDC, first configure the source connector to publish changes to a Kafka topic, then deploy the JDBC sink connector with a custom message transformer to apply the changes on the sink as needed. Start by setting up a PostgreSQL instance and connecting to it, inserting data into YugabyteDB, and then checking if the records have been replicated to the Postgres database using CDC. This approach allows for real-time replication of data between databases, enabling more efficient data processing and analysis.