Amazon MSK Reviews

Behind the scenes, we use Kafka. We tried using MSK to collect old data surrounding inventory from e-commerce websites, for example.

MSK should be easier to integrate with other solutions. It should be more flexible, integration-wise.

MSK has a private network that's an out-of-the-box feature. For our case, we needed something public. We can't handle private-only. So, in order to make the data public, we had to do some extra work. It became too risky for us. That's the main reason we stopped using it.

I didn't use Amazon MSK very long; I was just running some evaluations on it. 

I haven't used this solution enough to know if there are any bugs present.

It's quite scalable. I didn't notice any scalability concerns while I was evaluating it. As it's cluster-based, I didn't see any limitations, scalability-wise. I think it's pretty easy to scale out.

I haven't used technical support directly related to this solution; however, I have contacted Amazon support for other solutions. Most of the time, they're helpful, but sometimes they're not. When I started using AWS roughly nine years ago, the support was very good. Recently, it seems as though the support is less knowledgeable. 

I don't think it's too complicated. It's pretty straightforward.

If you're interested in using this solution, be sure to do some POC before integrating it. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

Kafka is open-source software. In order for you to leverage it behind the scenes, you have to use ZooKeeper, which is essentially a type of server — you have to integrate with it. If you don't use MSK, then you'll have to do this manually, by yourself. MSK has already launched ZooKeeper and the cluster. This is included as an out-of-the-box feature, which is very convenient.