Apache Kafka vs Confluent: Comparing Features & Capabilities

For a Confluent Cloud cluster, the expected performance for any
given workload is dependent on a variety of dimensions, such as message size and number of partitions. Enterprise clusters can be a source of a cluster link,
dependent on the networking type and the other cluster involved. Concatenate
the records to produce multiple records in the same request. Delivery reports
are concatenated in the same order as the records are sent. Client applications can connect over the REST API to Produce records directly
to the Confluent Cloud cluster.

  1. However they are deployed, they are independent machines each running the Kafka broker process.
  2. This includes Schema Registry, the Avro serializers, KSQL, REST Proxy, etc.
  3. Dedicated clusters are provisioned and billed in terms of Confluent Unit for Kafka (CKU).
  4. Reduced infrastructure mode means that no metrics and/or monitoring data is visible in Control Center and
    internal topics to store monitoring data are not created.
  5. Learn why Forrester says “Confluent is a Streaming force to be reckoned with” and what sets us apart.

Go above & beyond Kafka with all the essential tools for a complete data streaming platform. For developers who want to get familiar with the platform, you can start with the Quick Start for Confluent Platform. This quick start shows you how to run Confluent Platform using Docker on a single broker, single cluster
development environment with topic replication factors set to 1. Commonly used to build real-time streaming data pipelines and real-time streaming applications, today, there are hundreds of Kafka use cases. Any company that relies on, or works with data can find numerous benefits. All of these are examples of Kafka connectors available in the Confluent Hub, a curated collection of connectors of all sorts and most importantly, all licenses and levels of support.

Currently, there is a plugin available for Confluent REST Proxy which helps in authenticating the incoming requests and propagating
the authenticated principal to requests to Kafka. This enables Confluent REST Proxy clients to utilize the multi-tenant security
features of the Kafka broker. For more information, see REST Proxy Security,
the REST Proxy Security Plugin, and
Schema Registry Security Plugin. Each release includes the latest release of Kafka and additional tools and services that make it easier
to build and manage an Event Streaming Platform. Confluent Platform delivers both community and commercially licensed features that
complement and enhance your Kafka deployment.

Spring Framework and Apache Kafka®

You must tell Control Center about the REST endpoints for all brokers in your cluster,
and the advertised listeners for the other components you may want to run. Without
these configurations, the brokers and components will not show up on Control Center. Start with the broker.properties file you updated in the previous sections with regard to replication factors and enabling Self-Balancing Clusters. You will make a few more changes to this file, then use it as the basis for the other servers. The following table shows a summary of the configurations to specify for each of these files, as a reference to check against if needed. The steps in the next sections guide you through a quick way to set up these files, using existing the existing broker.properties file (KRaft) or
server.properties file (ZooKeeper) as a basis for your specialized ones.

This includes non-Java libraries for client development and server processes
that help you stream data more efficiently in a production environment, like Confluent Schema Registry,
ksqlDB, and Confluent Hub. Confluent offers
Confluent Cloud, a data-streaming service, and Confluent Platform, software you ondas de elliot download and manage yourself. Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed streaming system used for stream processing, real-time data pipelines, and data integration at scale. Apache Kafka® is an open-source, distributed, event streaming platform capable of handling
large volumes of real-time data.

Management services and Reduced infrastructure mode¶

A rich catalog of design patterns to help you understand the interaction between the different parts of the Kafka ecosystem, so you can build better event streaming applications. Create, import, share streams of events like payments, orders, and database changes in milliseconds, at scale. If you are ready to start working at the command line, skip to Kafka Commands Primer and try creating Kafka topics, working with producers and consumers, and so forth.

Monitoring Kafka

A transform is a simple function that accepts one record as an input and outputs
a modified record. All transforms provided by Kafka Connect perform simple but
commonly useful modifications. Note that you can implement the
Transformation
interface with your own custom logic, package them as a Kafka
Connect plugin, and use them with
any connector. The following image shows an example of Control Center running in Reduced infrastructure mode. Management services are provided in both Normal and Reduced infrastructure mode. By default Control Center operates in Normal mode, meaning both management and monitoring features are enabled.

To reduce usage on this dimension, you can compress your messages
and ensure each consumer is only consuming from the topics it requires. Gzip is not recommended because it incurs high overhead on the cluster. Operate 60%+ more efficiently and achieve an ROI of 257% with a fully managed service that’s elastic, resilient, and truly cloud-native. Kora manages 30,000+ fully managed clusters for customers to connect, process, and share all their data. Here are the major differences between Confluent and Kafka, as well as a complete stackup of features – from connectors, security, and monitoring, to governance.

As of Confluent Platform 7.5, ZooKeeper is deprecated for new deployments. To learn more about running Kafka in KRaft mode, see KRaft Overview, the KRaft steps in the Platform Quick Start,
and Settings for other components. Confluent Platform
is a specialized distribution of Kafka
that includes additional features and APIs. Many of
the commercial Confluent Platform features are built into the brokers as a
function of Confluent Server. This hands-on course will show you how to build event-driven applications with Spring Boot and Kafka Streams. We’ve re-engineered Kafka to provide a best-in-class cloud experience, for any scale, without the operational overhead of infrastructure management.

In many systems, these formats are ad
hoc, only implicitly defined by the code, and often are duplicated
across each system that uses that message type. The librdkafka library is the C/C++ implementation of the Kafka protocol, containing both Producer and Consumer
support. It was designed with message delivery, reliability and high performance in mind. This library includes
support for many features of Kafka including message security.

Out of the box, you also get Schema Registry, REST Proxy, a total of
100+ pre-built Kafka connectors, and ksqlDB. Bi-weekly newsletter with Apache Kafka® resources, news from the community, and fun links. Nevertheless, the company presents a solid growth strategy that relies in part on customers signing up for a free cloud trial and quickly realising https://bigbostrade.com/ the power of the Confluent ecosystem. Confluent cites data from Gartner that models the size of the total addressable market to expand at a 22% compounded annual growth rate to $91bn by 2024. Companies that excel at being able to deliver on their promises to consumers should see superior growth versus those that consistently disappoint.

If the message does have a key, then the destination partition will be computed from a hash of the key. This allows Kafka to guarantee that messages having the same key always land in the same partition, and therefore are always in order. Kafka Connect reads message
from Kafka and converts the binary representation to a sink record. If there is a transform, Kafka Connect passes the
record through the first transformation, which makes its modifications and
outputs a new, updated sink record.

Dedicated clusters can be a source or destination of a cluster link,
dependent on the networking type and the other cluster involved. To learn more,
see Supported cluster types in the Cluster Linking documentation. During a resize operation, your applications may see leader elections, but otherwise performance will not suffer. Dedicated clusters have infinite storage,
which means there is no maximum size limit for the amount of data that can be stored
on the cluster.

This page describes how Kafka Connect works, and includes important
Kafka Connect terms and key concepts. You’ll learn
what Kafka Connect is–including its benefits and framework–and gain the
understanding you need to put your data in motion. Reduced infrastructure mode is designed for use with Confluent Health+ monitoring features
and is compatible with a limited set of triggers.