Apache Kafka Reviews

Our primary use case of this solution is for data integration and for real-time data consumption. I'm a senior staff engineer for data and infrastructure and we are customers of Apache. 

I love the simplicity of the library and the design as well as the architectural concept which is like horizontal scaling.

When compared to other commercial competitors, Kafka doesn't have the ability to scale down, the elasticity is lacking in the product. The other issue for us is the delayed queue, which was available to us in the commercial software but not in Kafka. It's something we use in most of our applications for deferred processing and I know it's available in other solutions. I'd like to see some tooling support and language support in the open source version. 

I've been using this solution for four years.

The stability is good. 

The solution scales horizontally and scales better than its competitors. We have around 400 to 500 microservices consuming this cluster and the company has around 600 employees. We have four different verticals, each with around 100 engineers with 100 to 150 microservices. 90% of the microservices have a touchpoint with Kafka.

I think the community is very good and will respond if you raise a ticket. We also use external third-party libraries that were built in GitHub. It would be good to have some direct support from Apache.

Four years ago we were using Rabbit MQ but we switched to Kafka because Rabbit was designed for a very narrow use case. It became difficult for us to run and maintain that server and our client libraries. We had a huge outage, so we shifted to Kafka because of the simplicity in the architecture.

The initial setup was simple although we had a couple of hiccups. It took around a week but that was several years ago and we haven't had any problems since. Our team carried out the deployment and we currently have a few engineers who deal with maintenance. 

We are currently using the open-source version. 

There is room for improvement with this solution so I rate it eight out of 10. 

We use Apache Kafka to ingest a lot of data in real time that Apache Spark processes, and the result is used for a tech decision in real time – in the IT environment, infrastructure environment, and IOT environment, like for a  manufacturing plant.

This is an open-source framework. We also sell professional services on this solution and specifically create a business application for customers. 

The application is called Sherlogic. We have two kinds of customers. We have end-user customers that use the Sherlogic solution, and maybe customers don't know that there is Spark and Kafka in Sherlogic. But we have another kind of customer that uses professional services by Xautomata to create tailor-made applications in analytics and the automation process.

We use Apache Kafka for our digital cloud.

To store a large set of analytical data we are using SQL repository. This type of repository works very well but we need specific and high maintenance. The user experience is friendly.

We are looking for alternative solutions, we tried with noSQL solutions and Confluent specific features but the results were not satisfactory both in terms of performance and usability.

We are working on automated SQL repository management and maintenance tools in order to increase the democratization of our platform.

We've been using this solution for a year and a half.

The stability is very nice. We currently manage 50 million events daily.

It's scalable.

Support is good. It's typical for an open source application. You can have all the information in a public portal. If you want specific consulting, there is a company that promotes this consulting worldwide called Conduent. Their consulting is quick and they have a lot of know-how.

It's very complex, like Spark. 

Deployment took 50 minutes for all the Kubernetes ports, Spark, Kafka, and other components based on Sherlogic. In 30 minutes, we created an environment using this program to make installation easier.

Deployment was done in-house, but we're starting a collaboration with another company and we introduced this company to running this solution. Specifically, we started a collaboration with AWS to promote our platform in a Western marketplace. In this way, it's very easy to use our solution because it is a part of an AWS service, certificated by an engineer.

The return on investment has been having people dedicated to this solution because it's open source so it hasn't been necessary to invest in licensing or pay a fee. So, internal know-how has been the ROI.

It's a bit cheaper compared to other Q applications.

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10.

I would recommend this solution because the queue manager is very fast and stable.

We have a camera monitoring security system, in which we post messages onto the queue, which involves various steps in processing the message, like checking for the number of clients, running it against the police data, etc. So Apache Kafka is a security application with many types of consumers. We set up a workflow system with different sites, which works well.

As a software developer, I have found Apache Kafka's support to be the most valuable. The support team sends available information regarding the library and how to use the plugins. The solution is easy to integrate with any of our systems. We have other alternatives, but this is the one that seems to be the most popular database support.

The solution should be easier to manage. It needs to improve its visualization feature in the next release.

I have been using it for three years.

It is a stable solution. We never faced any issues. I rate it a ten out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. We set up a category with different consumers balancing things, which works as I thought.

I did not contact the technical support as it was not required.

We used Linksys for visualization along with Confluence, but there needed to be more value. For us, Apache Kafka is the best solution based on the support and third-party systems as it builds our subsystems around because we have a lot of development teams.

The initial setup was straightforward because I've got a lot of experience in this field. But even for a junior person, it would be fine. There are so many resources, and it's very well documented as they are a premium service provider. So it makes the setup just easier.

The deployment takes a few days.

We set up a free cluster for this service because we use a lot of data. We use ZooKeeper to secure different products for instruction with the cluster. But, it was easy as it is a popular product, and much information is available. It can download data, like fifty gigs per day. We can effectively handle it all as well. I never developed any issues.

It's a premium product, so it is not price-effective for us.

Apache Kafka is an out-of-the-box, reliable solution. For people in the fiber business, we need a reliable solution, and this solution is hundred percent reliable. If it is set up correctly, it hardly has any issues due to the more extensive user base; even if there are issues, it is sorted by the community. I rate it nine out of ten.

I use Kafka to send network packets from different sources to my cluster. We have around 10 users at my company.

Kafka is scalable. It can manage a high volume of data from many sources.

The interface has room for improvement, and there is a steep learning curve for Hadoop integration. It was a struggle learning to send from Hadoop to Kafka. In future releases, I'd like to see improvements in ETL functionality and Hadoop integration. 

I have used Kafka for around six months.

I rate Apache Kafka seven out of 10 for stability. 

I rate Kafka eight out of 10 for scalability. 

I rate Apache support six out of 10. It was hard to find the information I needed. 

Neutral

Before Kafka, I sent feeds directly to Hadoop.

I initially found Kafka difficult to set up, so I would rate it about five out of 10 for ease of setup. After I learned more about the platform, I would rate it eight out of 10. It is deployed on-premises over a cluster of three or four PCs. You can deploy Kafka in a few hours with one person. 

Kafka is open source. 

I rate Apache Kafka eight out of 10. I would recommend it to others. 

We have got this product, which is meant for integration. So our use cases are essentially integrating with other systems, using any messaging stack. We use these products in Dev and QA and we have connectors for various different messaging applications. Apache Kafka just happens to be one of the messaging applications that we connect with. We also have our own messaging, it's called Enterprise Messaging Server and Rendezvous, we connect to those also. Our product is essentially used for integration. So we connect to almost all messaging applications.

The most valuable feature is the speed at which the solution can be deployed.

The solution can improve its cloud support.

I have been using the solution in Dev and QA for a few years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

Since we are supporting various different messaging applications, we tend to use and support all the messaging applications that are popular. Like SQS, Google pops up, Active MQ, Rapid MQ, MQTT, and IBM MQ.

The open-source version is relatively straightforward to set up and only takes a few minutes.

We typically implement the solution in-house.

The solution is open source.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

We test all the supported versions of the solution based on our customers' use.

We support our integration product. So we need to do dev and QA with Apache Kafka or any other messaging applications. But we do not provide support. The solution can be supported by someone else.

We don't need to have any specific staff for deployment. All the developers in QA can install and configure the solution. We don't have a separate person for maintenance.

Our team and our product dev and QAs all use the solution.

I think Apache Kafka is a good solution and I recommend it to others.

Apache Kafka is used for connecting components between each other in the same application. The use is quite limited, but I was curious about its filtering capability of it.

We implemented the notification system between our components, and we found that Apache Kafka performs well in scalability. It has improved our organization because of the scalability and the comfort of a fail-safe or disaster recovery it provides.

Apache Kafka can improve by making the documentation more user-friendly. It would be beneficial if we could explain to customers in more detail how the solution operates but the documentation get highly technical quickly. For example, if they had a simple page where we can show the customers how it works without the need for the customer to have a computer science background.

I have been using Apache Kafka for approximately two years.

Apache Kafka is scalable. It is easy to add brokers.

We have approximately 30 people using this solution in my organization. They use the solution daily.

I have only used Apache Kafka.

The initial setup of Apache Kafka took some time but after it was easy.

I rate the initial setup of Apache Kafka a three out of five.

We set up the solution in-house.

This is an open-source solution and is free to use.

We have not used the solution in production. We do not have a lot of data at the moment.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Apache Kafka an eight out of ten.

The primary use case of the solution is for asset communication through our microservices.

The solution has allowed us to take the use cases provided by another communication tool and resolve those issues.

The most valuable feature is how persistent it is. For example, we are able to reprocess messages when we need to, we're able to recover methods to consume them.

The solution can be improved by reducing the cost to run it on the premises.

I have been using the solution for four years.

The stability of the solution is good.

The solution is scalable.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The implementation was through a vendor.

I have seen a return on investment with this solution.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

We have 80 people using the solution and five people are required to maintain it.

I suggest using cloud services because the solution is expensive if you are using it on-premises.

We are building solutions on Apache Kafka for four customers. The customers we have are in various sectors, such as healthcare and architecture.

Apache Kafka has good integration capabilities and has plenty of adapters in its ecosystem if you want to build something. There are adapters for many platforms, such as Java, Azure, and Microsoft's ecosystem. Other solutions, such as Pulsar have fewer adapters available.

I have been using Apache Kafka for three years.

Apache Kafka is stable.

I would recommend Apache Kafka for any enterprise.

The amount of people using the solution depends on the application. However, the starting point is from 6,000 to 7,000 concurrent users.

There is not any support, Apache Kafka is open-source.

We have been experimenting with other solutions such as VMware RabbitMQ and Pulsar.

We are going to replace the Apache Kafka solution using Pulsar.

Pulsar gives more scalability to an even grouping, but Apache Kafka is used more if you want to send something in a time series-based. If this does not matter to you then Pulsar could be more customizable. Apache Kafka is nothing but a streaming system with local storage. Apache Kafka fits into many use cases, it's very direct, but if you want more specific use cases and you use Apache Kafka, Pulsar could be considered.

Apache Kafka was simple to install. If you have a complicated clustered production, it takes time. However, for the development, it doesn't take more than one or two hours.

We have approximately two to four technical managers that are deploying and supporting Apache Kafka. A technical manager is necessary.

Apache Kafka is an open-sourced solution. There are fees if you want the support, and I would recommend it for enterprises. There are annual subscriptions available.

Apache Kafka is one of the best open-source solutions that are available today.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Apache Kafka an eight out of ten.