Kafka is an open-source program for storing, reading, and analyzing streaming data. It is open-source, which means it’s free-to-use amongst a big community of users and developers contributing to new features, upgrades, and support on a regular basis. Kafka can run on multiple servers as a distributed system, allowing it to take advantage of each server’s processing power and storage capacity.
Features of Kafka
- Scalability
Users can grow across all four dimensions with Apache Kafka: event producer, event processor, event consumer, and event connector. Without encountering downtime, you can scale Kafka successfully.
- Long-term Tenacity
Kafka’s default retention policy is seven days, although this can be altered by the user. You can store your data in Kafka for a limited time before removing the oldest values.
- Copying
Kafka Cluster replication is possible with MirrorMaker. Messages can be replicated to many Data Centers or Cloud Regions. The system can be used in active/passive settings to back up and recover data, as well as in inactive/passive scenarios to bring data closer to your users or fulfill local data requirements.
- Durability and Reliability
Kafka keeps a disc copy of its messages, enabling for intra-cluster replication. As a result, Kafka is a long-lasting communications system. Due to its distributed, partitioned, replicated, and fault-tolerant characteristics, Kafka is also extremely dependable.
Top 6 Alternatives for Enterprises
Kafka is a widely used publish-subscribe messaging technology that can handle both online and offline messages and can manage massive volumes of data with operational simplicity through Kafka Architecture.
On the other hand, it has some flaws, such as poor speeds, message tweaking, and fewer message paradigms, which has led to an increase in the use of Kafka Alternatives. The following is a thorough list of the best Kafka alternatives for managing real-time data streams with low latency and high throughput:
- Amazon Kinesis
Real-time video and data streams are streamed, collected, processed, and analyzed using Amazon Kinesis. It gives you real-time data and gives you complete freedom and scalability. You may ingest a variety of data formats using Kinesis, including audio, video, and app logs.
Kinesis makes it possible to handle streaming apps without having to worry about additional infrastructure. With minimal latency, this highly scalable platform can process data from a variety of sources. Amazon Kinesis is one of the most popular Kafka alternatives, thanks to its speed, ease of use, reliability, and cross-platform replication capabilities. It’s utilized for a variety of things, including user-connected geographical data, social networking data, and IoT sensors.
- Rabbit MQ
RabbitMQ is an open-source message broker that is simple to set up and use in the cloud. It not only supports asynchronous messaging services, but it also provides a superb developer experience with Java, Go, Python, Ruby, and other languages. Kafka runs on a variety of operating systems and cloud infrastructure since it is extensively used by developers with numerous languages. RabbitMQ can also be used to provide high availability in a distributed setting.
RabbitMQ’s lightweight design makes it simple to deploy on both public and private clouds. RabbitMQ is backed by a strong support system as well as a vibrant developer community. RabbitMQ is one of the greatest Kafka alternatives since it is open-source software and it is free.
- Active MQ
ActiveMQ is a multi-protocol messaging broker that is flexible and open-source. It supports a wide range of protocols. Developers may now employ a wide range of languages and platforms with ease. The AMQP protocol allows for easy integration with a wide range of systems and applications. The load balancing, resource allocation, and management features of ActiveMQ, however, complement its high-end data accessibility capabilities. With its simple yet powerful message semantics, ActiveMQ can be simply integrated into almost any application. ActiveMQ is well-known for efficiently allocating resources and integrating services across various apps.
- Red Hat AMQ
Red Hat AMQ is a secure and lightweight message delivery solution that is one of the best Kafka alternatives, thanks to a robust set of components based on Apache Kafka and ActiveMQ communities. Red Hat AMQ has a faster execution time than most streaming tools and provides a flexible messaging tool for instant communication. As a result, Red Hat AMQ meets organizational requirements and integrates business apps across organizations.
Red Hat AMQ provides real-time data from data sources and seamless connectivity with IoT devices. Red Hat AMQ effectively handles long-running queries when Kafka and ActiveMQ are combined. Red Hat AMQ is a great alternative to Apache Kafka because of its two-fold advantages.
- IBM MQ
IBM MQ delivers enterprise-level messaging capabilities, allowing secure and fast communication between applications. The system facilitates project-to-project communication while efficiently handling multiple transactions. It keeps the one-and-only-once delivery pattern, which guarantees security.
IBM MQ is one of the best Kafka alternatives, with an intuitive user interface and high data security and reliability. It also makes interoperability between different applications within and outside the organization easier. Because of its basic structure, IBM MQ allows developers to focus on essential issues and manage any changes to transaction volumes asynchronously.
- Amazon SQS
SQS (Simple Queue Service) by Amazon is a fully managed messaging queueing service for Distributed Systems, Serverless Applications, and Microservices. It’s well-known for component separation and the building of asynchronous processes. Developers prefer it because of its good SDK and functioning console.
Dead-letter queues and cost allocation tags are typical features of Amazon SQS. With Amazon SQS, you can use any programming language that supports the AWS SDK to access the web services API.
Conclusion
In this article, you learnt about Kafka, its characteristics, and several top Kafka Alternatives. Even though Kafka is extensively utilized, the technology segment has advanced to the point where other options can eclipse Kafka’s drawbacks. There are several options available for picking a stream processing system. As the demand for real-time data grows, organizations are increasingly adopting event-driven architectures powered by event streaming and stream processing technologies.
