Amazon Web Services offers the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) which provides pub/sub messaging and push notifications to iOS and Android devices. It is meant to operate in a microservices architecture and which can support event-driven contingencies and support the decoupling of applications.
$0.01
per 1 million
Apache Kafka
Score7.7 out of 10
N/A
Apache Kafka is an open-source stream processing platform developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala and Java. The Kafka event streaming platform is used by thousands of companies for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications.
Users have utilized Apache Kafka primarily as a robust event streaming and messaging system, capable of handling extensive volumes of data with ease. It is employed across various industries for high-throughput applications, such as real-time analytics and monitoring systems, where massive amounts of data are ingested from multiple sources. Kafka’s strength lies in its ability to facilitate real-time data pipelines and streaming applications, with users particularly valuing its performance in environments where durability and low latency are critical.
On the other hand, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is predominantly adopted for its straightforward notification services within many user environments, particularly in scenarios requiring immediate user alerts or inter-service communication. Users have highlighted its integral role in workflows where notifications, such as SMS or email alerts, need to be disseminated quickly and reliably across different system components or directly to stakeholders. The service is praised for its ease of setup and integration with other AWS services, making it a popular choice for applications needing scalable and efficient communication mechanisms.
Although both Kafka and SNS provide messaging solutions, their typical use cases reflect their distinct architectural benefits and limitations. Kafka is more suited for complex, large-scale streaming tasks that require reliable processing of high volumes of data, whereas SNS is tailored towards simpler, notification-driven scenarios where immediate, broad-reach messaging is needed.
The Amazon SNS service is well suited to support event notifications, monitoring applications, workflow systems, time-sensitive information updates, and mobile applications that generates or consumes notifications. It can be used to relay time-critical events to mobile applications and devices. It provides significant advantages to developers who build mobile applications that rely on real-time events. It is not well suited for hybrid cross platform mobile application frameworks at this juncture. An optimal version to meet the needs of a cross platform mobile developer is needed as generally the frameworks are not meant to manage real-time events. It is also not suited for cases where the queue management needs improvement or requires special workflows/tooling.
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Apache Kafka is well-suited for most data-streaming use cases. Amazon Kinesis and Azure EventHubs, unless you have a specific use case where using those cloud PaAS for your data lakes, once set up well, Apache Kafka will take care of everything else in the background. Azure EventHubs, is good for cross-cloud use cases, and Amazon Kinesis - I have no real-world experience. But I believe it is the same.
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Really easy to configure. I've used other message brokers such as RabbitMQ and compared to them, Kafka's configurations are very easy to understand and tweak.
Very scalable: easily configured to run on multiple nodes allowing for ease of parallelism (assuming your queues/topics don't have to be consumed in the exact same order the messages were delivered)
Not exactly a feature, but I trust Kafka will be around for at least another decade because active development has continued to be strong and there's a lot of financial backing from Confluent and LinkedIn, and probably many other companies who are using it (which, anecdotally, is many).
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At times you receive access denied errors which are annoying.
Rarely do you receive internal failure errors where you can't access the information. It is rare but it does happen.
You are required to add an MWS Authentication Token every so often. I wish it would pull that information automatically for you so you don't have to go searching for it.
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Sometimes it becomes difficult to monitor our Kafka deployments. We've been able to overcome it largely using AWS MSK, a managed service for Apache Kafka, but a separate monitoring dashboard would have been great.
Simplify the process for local deployment of Kafka and provide a user interface to get visibility into the different topics and the messages being processed.
Learning curve around creation of broker and topics could be simplified
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It is useful for applications developed using event driven architecture. It helps in tracking and logging the events in a very timely and efficient manner. The dashboards are a little difficult to implement. But overall it is very easy to integrate with other AWS services like Lambda, API GW, S3 and DynamoDB. The permissions to access should be resolved before using it.
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Apache Kafka is highly recommended to develop loosely coupled, real-time processing applications. Also, Apache Kafka provides property based configuration. Producer, Consumer and broker contain their own separate property file
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Amazon Simple Notification Sevices (SNS) support depends on your usage pattern and definitely on your support plan as an enterprise with AWS. Before reaching out to support you should read their documentation, as they have mentioned almost all the common issues and their solutions there. However, for specific issues, they generally respond in 1-2 business days.
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Support for Apache Kafka (if willing to pay) is available from Confluent that includes the same time that created Kafka at Linkedin so they know this software in and out. Moreover, Apache Kafka is well known and best practices documents and deployment scenarios are easily available for download. For example, from eBay, Linkedin, Uber, and NYTimes.
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Amazon’s SNS is incredibly easy to set up compared to the more powerful, but complex, Kafka flavours.
SNS’s core advantages are –
· no setup/no maintenance
· either a queue (SQS) or a topic (SNS)
· various limitations (on size, how long a message lives, etc)
· limited throughput: you can do batch and concurrent requests, but still achieving high throughputs would be expensive
· SNS has notifications for email, SMS, SQS, HTTP built-in.
· no "message stream" concept Overall, it would be the best choice to get into the concepts of Pub/Sub concepts as although it has limitations it can provide significant capabilities and solutions
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I used other messaging/queue solutions that are a lot more basic than Confluent Kafka, as well as another solution that is no longer in the market called Xively, which was bought and "buried" by Google. In comparison, these solutions offer way fewer functionalities and respond to other needs.
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Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) saved us a lot of extra coding time by providing straightforward functionality we needed in our ad campaign automation tool.
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) allows us to maintain a consistent, serverless model within our applications.
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Positive: Get a quick and reliable pub/sub model implemented - data across components flows easily.
Positive: it's scalable so we can develop small and scale for real-world scenarios
Negative: it's easy to get into a confusing situation if you are not experienced yet or something strange has happened (rare, but it does). Troubleshooting such situations can take time and effort.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
