Apache Kafka Reviews

The most valuable features to me are replication, partitioning and easy integration with Apache Spark, which we use quite a bit for distributed processing.

Replication is good for high availability. It provides additional safety for data in case of node failure or data center outage. Partitioning is a really useful feature for parallelizing processing. We use Apache Spark to process data from a Kafka queue, and Spark is able to assign one executor to each Kafka partition. The more partitions we have, the more threads we can use to process data in parallel. This helps us achieve really good throughput.

It will help us build a scalable platform. This will allow the company to provide better customer service.

It’s pretty easy to use for now. I haven’t had any difficulty or problems that I can complain about. Maybe they can add a UI to the configure queues and to display statistics about data stores.

I have used Kafka for about a year.

So far, we have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not had any scalability issues. The product is horizontally scalable, so adding extra hardware is all that is needed.

We haven’t needed technical support with the product yet.

I think performance-wise, the product is very good and fits in our use case. We used other distributed message queues, but all products have their own use case

Initial setup wasn’t really complex. We use Kafka through Hortonworks Suite, which comes with many other big data tools. Ambari makes it easy to setup

Licensing and pricing was handled by my management, so I don’t have much knowledge there.

Give it a try. It’s a valuable, high-performance, distributed processing tool.

We use the solution for analytics for streaming. We also use it for fraud detection.

The Kafka Streams library gives quite a bit of functionality. The connectors provided by the solution are valuable.

The ability to connect the producers and consumers must be improved. It's still a pain point because a lot of development goes into it.

I have been using the solution for seven to eight years.

For what it does, the tool is very stable. It is a message broker. It receives the messages and holds them for producers and consumers. It's usually everything around Kafka that has stability problems because Kafka does exactly what it's supposed to do.

Scalability is one of the main selling points of the tool. The additional nodes we add give us the additional storage capacity we need. I rate the scalability a ten out of ten. The solution is used across multiple domains in our organization. I use the product daily. It’s a continuously growing platform.

Apache doesn't provide support. There are sites we can go to for information, but there's no support team for Apache. There are companies like Confluent and HPE that provide support for the solution.

We also use Flink and other streaming tools. We use Apache Kafka in addition to other technologies because of the requirement and the business use cases.

It is super easy to set up. I rate the ease of setup a ten out of ten. However, building and administration get quite difficult. It takes three months to make things production-ready.

The deployment was done in-house. We used the tools that we have in our CI/CD pipeline. We needed three people for the deployment. The infrastructure team maintains the tool. The infrastructure team has three to ten members.

We see an ROI on the product. If we don't have a tool to buffer the amount of traffic coming in from high-traffic sites, we cannot use the data. Apache Kafka gives us a resting area where we can push as much information as we want to. It’s picked up by consumers when they need it.

It’s a huge return on investment. Otherwise, we must have a system tied to the producer waiting for the consumer to consume before we can do anything with the rest of the messages. A solution like Kafka provides us with a buffer to consume the data as we choose to.

The price depends on who we are getting the product from. If we buy it from Confluent, we always have to try to negotiate the price. The price is always negotiable.

Overall, I rate the product a six out of ten.