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Apache Kafka Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services Reviews & Insights

Score7.7 out of 10

137 Reviews and Ratings

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Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Apache Kafka are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Fault tolerance and high scalability: Users have consistently praised Apache Kafka for its fault tolerance and high scalability. Many reviewers have stated that Kafka excels in handling large volumes of data and is considered a workhorse in data streaming.

Ease of administration: Reviewers appreciate Kafka's ease of administration, noting that it offers an abundance of options for managing and maintaining queues. Multiple users have mentioned that the platform allows for easy expansion and configuration of cluster growth, making it straightforward to administer.

Real-time streaming capabilities: Kafka's real-time streaming capabilities are seen as a significant advantage by users. Several reviewers have highlighted the platform's ability to handle real-time data pipelines and its resistance to node failure within the cluster. This feature enables users to process asynchronous data efficiently and ensures continuous availability of the system.

Apache Kafka Reviews

5 Reviews
Professional, Scientific, and Technical ServicesInformation Technology & Services5

The versatile Apache Kafka

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Apache Kafka for asynchronous communication.
For any processing that we need to do on background, we use Apache Kafka. We also set the configurations in such a way so that we can use it for retrying messages in a topic.
We also use it for data streaming which powers our data platform.

Pros

  • Its extremely fast. It is able to deliver messages very quickly.
  • It is very reliable, I have not yet seen any cases where messages might have dropped
  • Using different configurations we can model it any way and cater to large number of business use cases.

Cons

  • If there can be some way of scheduling messages to reappear that would be great.
  • There should be functionality of decreasing the partitions on the fly so that we can scale down when needed.
  • Apache Kafka should have better consumer UI view so that we can more details on the consumers attached.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited for any asynchronous programming use case. It is also a good fit for the data streaming use case. It is not suited for use cases where batching of messages is needed.
AS
Ankit Singh
Senior Engineering Manager in Information Technology at Pharmeasy (Information Technology & Services, 501-1000 employees)
Vetted Review
Apache Kafka
4 years of experience

Confluent Kafka for messaging.

Rating: 6 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently consulting and implementing for a bank, we use a cloud-native Kafka solution (Confluent Kafka) for brokering. The solution is well documented, and liked by the developers but lacks certain technical aspects to improve usability and administration.

Pros

  • Brokering
  • Topic definition.

Cons

  • Private access to a cluster.
  • Visualisation solutions.

Likelihood to Recommend

For brokering messages, Confluent Kafka is well suited since it offers a managed solution ready to use. Scenarios where the solution is not very well suited are for example, where pricing is an issue. The solution costs quite a lot for basic usage (for example: for 3 clusters, pricing is above 100k$ a year).
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology (Information Technology & Services company, 1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
Apache Kafka
2 years of experience

Apache Kafka - a must have tool for distributed toolkit

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My application was dependent on other applications to generate data and those data were needed to be processed immediately. And, processed data were published for other applications. Moreover, data load was very high nearly a hundred thousand a day. And, consumed data may be replayed in the future if required. So, after carefully considering several messaging queues we finally decided to continue with Apache Kafka.

Pros

  • Every setting is configurable.
  • Work seamlessly during high data load.
  • Partition mechanism.
  • Easy configurable.

Cons

  • Zookeeper configuration.
  • Front-end can be developed to configure properties.
  • UI for administrative configuration.

Likelihood to Recommend

Kafka can be used as a database but it is not recommended to store data for a long time. Also, if your application has a high data load then only we should utilize Kafka otherwise any other messaging queue is recommended. In addition, Apache Kafka provides far more features than just a simple messaging queue. Using Apache Kafka we can develop loosely coupled, real-time processing, and fault-tolerance architecture.
JV
Jimesh V Shah
Senior Software Engineer in Information Technology at Accion Labs (Information Technology & Services, 1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
Apache Kafka
3 years of experience
View profile

Apache Kafka is awesome! Tricky sometimes, but we love it!

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Kafka is an event streaming platform and this is exactly the purpose we use it for in our company. Application data-in-transit goes into Kafka, which generates an even, and all relevant applications (consumers) get notified and then consume said messages. We are really happy with the volume of data we get through and the speed that we get from Kafka. It's used in multiple 1st and 3rd party components of the applications we develop in the entire company. It addresses data proliferation and notifications. If not for Kafka, we'd have to invent a pub/sub model (which multiple people have in the past in this company) - those are complex, hard to maintain, extend and customize. Kafka is fair well documented and used so there is a lot of info about multiple use cases online.

Pros

  • The pub/sub model
  • Quick data transfer - regardless of volume (if you have enough resources)
  • Ability to transfer large amounts of data consistently (non-binary)

Cons

  • The Kafka Tool is a community-made Java application that looks and feels from the past century.
  • Logging can be confusing. This certainly shows when we have to do troubleshooting.
  • Hybrid scenarios - pub/sub, but there are services in and outside a Kubernetes cluster. Then there are a ~3 options, but only 2 (the harder ones) are production-safe.

Likelihood to Recommend

  • Pub/sub model when more services are involved.
  • A lot of of technologies know how to work with Kafka. There are Kafka libraries for all general-purpose languages.
  • Quick and reliable data transit and notifications.
  • Kafka can have a big memory and/or disk footprint depending on your scenario. Be prepared to delegate resources if your amount of data gets more and more. Kafka is lean by default, but it does require memory (in-mem storage) and disk (offloading) to keep your data.
  • Kafka has a lot of configuration options - be sure to check them if you need to fit Kafka into a specific scenario.
  • The Kafka Tools looks ancient, but it does what it's supposed to.
  • If your developers are debugging, they may unintentionally "steal" events/data from a given queue as they would probably register as a consumer. This is very nasty especially when dealing with a living system There are ways to avoid this, but people need to be aware that it can happen.
BT
Borislav Traykov
DevOps Team Leader in Engineering at Cognyte (Information Technology & Services, 1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
Apache Kafka
3 years of experience
View profile

Kafka quick queue

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Kafka as an ingress and egress queue for data being saved into a big data system. Kafka is also being used as a queue for frontend applications to use in order to retrieve data and analytics from MapR and HortonWorks.

Pros

  • Fast queuing
  • Easy to set up and configure
  • Easy to add and remove queues

Cons

  • User interface for configuration could be a little better
  • Could be a little more defined when configuring files
  • Logging is a little hard to follow

Likelihood to Recommend

If you need a queue for ingest or user interfaces Kafka is a great tool. Easy on the admins as well as the developers.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (Information Technology and Services company, 51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Apache Kafka
3 years of experience