Apache Kafka Valuable Features

AT
Group Manager at a media company with 201-500 employees

One of the major features that we are currently exploring, which is coming from my previous experience as well, is a multiple PubSub model kind of architecture. We have one hub data, which is the IBM DB2 system that banks use for their daytime transaction tracking from OLTP systems. We want to use the data on different platforms. So, we are trying to use Kafka in a model where it will be a publisher onto multiple messaging queues. These different messaging queues belong to different business units, where we are segregating the data lake we are building into different domains. For example, HR data is becoming too sensitive, so they don't want to give it to any other businesses. We are working on a common publisher and multiple subscriber model, which I feel is much more easily implementable using Kafka.

The other part that we are trying to implement, and which is in its very near center stages, is to see if we can make it future-ready. Right now, in the Middle East, there are not many cloud subscribers like DCP AWS and Azure. It is all on-premise. But it'll be there just in the next two or three years. So, we are trying to see if we can have these Kafka models working from a future perspective wherein instead of dumping some of the data into a data lake, we can directly dump it into solutions like DCP BigQuery for real-time analytics. This is just for the use cases, which are for real-time analytics. This data will definitely also be there in the data lake as that is the intention of keeping it. 

But using Kafka, we are trying to see if we can make these subscribers ready to use these DCP BigQuery platforms for real-time analytics. It's still in the remittance stages, but those are still use cases.

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Amit Laddha - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President (Information and Product Management) at Tradebulls Securities (P) Limited

Apache Kafka's most valuable features include clustering and sharding. Though we have not started using Apache Kafka Streams in our company, I have heard that it is one of the good features of the product we plan to use. The good features let you replay and reconsume messages in Apache Kafka, allowing you to have multiple consumer groups. The rebalancing feature of the product is also useful since if one consumer dies, then Apache Kafka does a rebalancing. With Apache Kafka, we use clustering, sharding, and partitioning features in our company.

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AbhishekGupta - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineering Leader at Walmart

The most valuable feature of Apache Kafka is Kafka Connect.

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Buyer's Guide
Apache Kafka
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Apache Kafka. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Harsha Ravnikar - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Solutions Architect at Sysmex America, Inc.

One of the most valuable features I have found is Kafka Connect.

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Reza Sadeghi - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Development Team Lead at asa com

Kafka is an open-source tool that's easy to use in our country, and the command line interface is powerful. 

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Jhon Rico - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Solutions Architect at BVC

Regarding the most valuable feature in Kafka, I would say it's scalability. The publisher-subscriber pattern and low latency are also essential features that greatly piqued my interest.

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Pratul Shukla - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The use of Kafka's logging mechanism has been extremely beneficial for us, as it allows us to sequence messages, track pointers, and manage memory without having to create multiple copies. We are currently on a legacy version and have found that the latest version of Kafka has solved many of the issues we were facing, such as sequencing, memory management, and more. Additionally, the fact that it is open source is a major benefit.

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MB
Architect at Agence Française de Développement

We use Kafka for mapping and ThoughtSpot data from one IT system source to the destination. We also prefer it to exchange data from our internal IT systems.


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Nor EL MALKI - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at Leyton & Associés, SAS

The most valuable feature of Apache Kafka is the clustering which is very easy to scale and we have multiple servers all over our platforms. It has been useful for stability and performance.

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SP
CEO at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

The high availability is valuable. It is robust, and we can rely on it for a huge amount of data. 

The Kafka Streams capability is also valuable. We get many options to build applications on top of Kafka.

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Bharath-Reddy - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect at Tekgeminus

Apache Kafka is an open-source solution that can be used for messaging or event processing.

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GT
Lead Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The main advantage is increased reliability, particularly with regard to data and the speed with which messages are published to the other side. 

The connectivity from the application is straightforward, as is the API integration.

These are some of the most valuable features of this solution. 

In terms of partition tolerance, message reliability is also present, which is a very good feature from the customer's perspective.

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Stuart-Cook - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO & Founder at a tech consulting company with 11-50 employees

The message bus capabilities, basically sending messages to it, and the way it handles events or messages is pretty good. The throughput was good. Generally, it was a good component.

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Rémy NOLLET - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Exchange Architect MQSeries at Decathlon International

It is a useful way to maintain messages and to manage offset from our consumers. 

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Silvio Lucas Pereira Filho - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Tech Lead at RecargaPay

We appreciate the ability to persistently and quickly write data, as well as the flexibility to customize it for multiple customers. Additionally, we like the ability to retain data within Apache Kafka and use features, such as time travel to access past customer data. The connection with other systems, such as Apache Kafka and IBM DB2. 

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AX
Senior Developer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Kafka's most valuable feature is its user-friendliness.

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Joaquin Marques - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO - Founder / Principal Data Scientist / Principal AI Architect at Kanayma LLC

The feature I find most valuable is the classification feature. Kafka enables you to tag content with a category.

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TD
Head of Technology - Money Movement Platform at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

All the features of Apache Kafka are valuable, I cannot single out one feature.

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AV
Technical Director at Metrofibre Networx

As a software developer, I have found Apache Kafka's support to be the most valuable. The support team sends available information regarding the library and how to use the plugins. The solution is easy to integrate with any of our systems. We have other alternatives, but this is the one that seems to be the most popular database support.

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RG
Senior Technology Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Resiliency is great and also the fact that it handles different data formats. There is one data format that's universal across multiple application domains — Avro. It's pretty universal compared to JSON, XML, SQI, and other formats.

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it_user590451 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

We use the product for high-scale distributed messaging. The processing capability of the product is enormous. Being a distributed platform, multiple consumers can sync with it and fetch messages.

Another great feature is the consumer offset log which tells you where the consumer left and where he needs to start again. Consumers aren’t required to code and put extra effort to maintain the offset.

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Felipe Lopes - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineering Manager at Alice

The most valuable feature is how persistent it is. For example, we are able to reprocess messages when we need to, we're able to recover methods to consume them.

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NK
Director at Tibco

The most valuable feature is the speed at which the solution can be deployed.

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JA
Technical Lead at Interface Fintech Ltd

It just works and it's super fast. We were struggling with a Rabbit MQ cluster, so the Apache cluster is way easier.

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SK
Barista Brewing Espresso at Linkedln

I love the simplicity of the library and the design as well as the architectural concept which is like horizontal scaling.

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ME
CTO at Estrada & Consultores

The solution is good for publishing transactions for commercial solutions whereby a duplicate will not affect any part of the system.

The solution is very easy to set up.

The stability is very good.

There's an online community available that can help answer questions or troubleshoot problems. 

The scalability of Kafka is very good.

It provides high throughput.

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DZ
Enterprise Architect at Smals vzw

There are numerous possibilities that can be explored. While it may be challenging to fully comprehend the potential advantages, one key aspect is the ability to establish a proper sequence of events rather than simply dealing with a jumbled group of occurrences. These events possess their own timestamps, even if they were not initially provided with one, and are arranged in a chronological order that allows for a clear understanding of the progression of the events.

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Ravi Kuppusamy - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO and Founder at BAssure Solutions

Apache Kafka has good integration capabilities and has plenty of adapters in its ecosystem if you want to build something. There are adapters for many platforms, such as Java, Azure, and Microsoft's ecosystem. Other solutions, such as Pulsar have fewer adapters available.

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KS
Solution Architect at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

The processing power of Apache Kafka is good when you have requirements for high throughput and a large number of consumers. 

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Moussa Chikhi - PeerSpot reviewer
Architecte Technique Senior at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable feature is the documentation, which is good and clear.

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Paul Adams - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant Solution Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The most valuable feature of Apache Kafka is its versatility. It can solve many use cases or can be a part of many use cases. Its fundamental value of it is in the real-time processing capability.

You need time-sensitive technology now, particularly in the analytics space. We have looked at using change data capture and Apache Kafka to modernize our analytics capabilities. Additionally, microservices can be used to capture events from legacy systems.

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RP
Assistant Professor at CHAROTAR UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

The valuable features are the group community and support.

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ShoaibKhan - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at APIZone

Besides better stability and scalability, there are no additional functionalities I'd like to see. Kafka is good at what it does.

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DP
Sr Technical Consultant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable features are the stream API, consumer groups, and the way that the scaling takes place. 

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LP
Owner at Binarylogicworks.com.au

The most valuable feature is the performance.

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TM
Building Event-centric Data processing Architectures at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The Kafka Streams library gives quite a bit of functionality. The connectors provided by the solution are valuable.

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TM
Assistant Student at a retailer with 5,001-10,000 employees

The most valuable feature is the messaging function and reliability.

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it_user653562 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

Apache Kafka is actually a distributed commit log. That is different than most messaging and queuing systems before it. I find the ability to write data at one velocity and have subscribing consumers read at different velocities to be the best feature.

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Abdul-Samad - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Kafka is scalable. It can manage a high volume of data from many sources.

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DS
Principal Technology Architect at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

With Kafka, events and streaming are persistent, and multiple subscribers can consume the data. This is an advantage of Kafka compared to simple queue-based solutions.

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MN
Project Engineer at Wipro Limited

When we're working with big data, we need a throughput computing panel, which is something that Kafka provides, and something we find extremely valuable. It helps us support computing and ensures there's no loss of data. It can even do replication with some data.

The delivery of data is it's most valuable aspect.

It's an easy to use product overall.

The solution is quite mature.

It's an open-source product, which means it doesn't cost us anything to use it.

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JL
Technical Consultant at KPMG
  • High availability
  • High throughput

With such a large digest, I was genuinely impressed at the process being almost real-time.

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it_user660591 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Java Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

The most valuable features are performance, persistent messaging, and reliability. It allows us to persist the message for a configurable number of days, even after it has been delivered to the consumer. The message delivery is also fast.

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it_user578787 - PeerSpot reviewer
Java Developer at a media company with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable features to me are replication, partitioning and easy integration with Apache Spark, which we use quite a bit for distributed processing.

Replication is good for high availability. It provides additional safety for data in case of node failure or data center outage. Partitioning is a really useful feature for parallelizing processing. We use Apache Spark to process data from a Kafka queue, and Spark is able to assign one executor to each Kafka partition. The more partitions we have, the more threads we can use to process data in parallel. This helps us achieve really good throughput.

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SG
Developer Infrastructure at Outbrain

It's very easy to install and it's pretty stable.

The possibility to have connectors is very helpful. Another valuable aspect is that it's mature and open-source. 

From a scalability point of view, you just add servers and it's scalable. The whole architecture is very scalable.

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KQ
Senior Technical Architect at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

I like the performance and reliability of Kafka. I needed a data streaming buffer that could handle thousands of messages per second with at least one processing point for an analytics pipeline. Kafka fits this requirement very well, as it is a fast, distributed message broker. It definitely does exactly what it is designed to do.

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YL
Vice President at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

I believe that the speed, and especially the performance, are very good features.

Also included is a cluster with built-in failover. 

It is the performance that is really meaningful.

In terms of features, we are satisfied. I don't require any additional features. I don't believe we require any additional features at this time.

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it_user642168 - PeerSpot reviewer
Big Data Lead at a marketing services firm with 51-200 employees

We are using Kafka consumer and producer.

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it_user660627 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineering Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Kafka, as compared with other messaging system options, is great for large scale message processing applications. It offers high throughput with built-in fault-tolerance and replication.

Messaging systems in general allow for logical and temporal decoupling between applications. Given Kafka's high availability, it's a great option to use if applications require availability, but not real-time processing.

If a downstream system is offline, messages can queue up and process when possible, but the user may not necessarily need to be aware of any issues.

A messaging-based architecture becomes important as a set of micro-services need to scale with high availability. Kafka is a great choice for messaging with such architecture.

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it_user650223 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Software Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Real-time streaming and persistence into distributed nodes. It provides a simple mechanism to create, publish, and subscribe.

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Sreekar Nethagani - PeerSpot reviewer
Co-Founder at Attaika

The solution has improved our functionality, it's one of the best streaming platforms I've used. 

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NC
Chief Technology Officer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

In my view, valuable features relate to microservices architecture and working on KStream and KSQL DB as a microservices event bus. The solution integrates very well. 

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JJ
Technology Lead at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable feature is that it can handle high volume.

Apache Kafa is open-source and some of our clients are interested in becoming more involved in that.

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it_user650004 - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Message Retention: Unlike regular message queues, messages stay in Kafka after clients consume them. A message can be consumed over and over again by the same or a different client until topic retention (by max data size or oldest message timestamp) kicks in and the oldest messages get deleted. This can be very handy in many scenarios: handling bugs in software, testing code, simple distribution of message processing, and routing messages to many different consumers simultaneously.
  • Horizontal Scalability: To add more capacity, both in terms of storage and performance to a Kafka cluster, you just need to add more servers. Regular message queues usually work in a master-slave configuration and do not scale very well horizontally.
  • Simplicity in operations.
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it_user647457 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Engineering
  • Scalability
  • Reliability
  • Ease of use
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it_user644286 - PeerSpot reviewer
Deputy General Manager, DevOps Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

One of the best features which I have worked with is replay.

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Andrea Castorino - PeerSpot reviewer
Program Manager at SirfinPA

This solution is robust and delivers messages quickly. It's a simple but good product.

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AM
IBMi/MIMIX Administrator at Arab Bank

Everything in Kafka is amazing.

The most valuable feature for us is the event monitoring.

It is easy to configure.

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Mukulit Bhati - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at InsightGeeks Solutions Pvt.

We get amazing throughput. We don't get any delay. 

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it_user592356 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead/Project Manager(Consulting Apple Inc) at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable features are topic-based eventing, scalability, and retention periods.

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it_user592338 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Architect at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Supports more than 10,000 events/second.
  • Scalability
  • Replication

It is a good product for event-driven architecture.

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OT
Senior Big Data Developer | Cloudera at Dilisim

Kafka has a good storage layer on its side. I can store this data if it's streaming, and, if we do encounter any error, for example, on the network or server, we can later use the data to do some analytics on it using the Kafka server.

Kafka provides us with a way to store the data used for analytics. That's the big selling point. There's very good log management. 

Kafka provides many APIs that can be flexible and can be placed or expanded using the development life cycle. For example, using Java, I can customize the API according to our customers' demands. I can expand the functionality according to our customer demands as well. It's also possible to create some models. It allows for more flexibility than much of the competition.

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it_user642942 - PeerSpot reviewer
Hadoop Technical Lead (Assistant Consultant) at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • Distributed
  • Persistence
  • Offset management by consumer
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DR
Founder, CEO at a tech vendor with 1-10 employees

The ability to partition data on Kafka is valuable. But Kafka needs support and management. It is better to have it fully managed on the cloud.

The only reason I give Kafka as product a low rating is because there are far superior and cheaper alternatives in cloud-based solutions, where we save money on manpower, electricity, servers, datacenters, networking, etc.

In fact, this is the view I have for pretty much all open source software compared to cloud based services. They just make things cheaper, faster, scalable and manageable. Kafka is good, but Kafka as a cloud service is awesome!!

This is a relative rating (compared to cloud services), not that something is wrong with Kafka. I hope that is clear.

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MS
Senior Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The stream processing is a very valuable aspect of the solution for us.

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RH
freelance at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The most valuable features of this solution is the architectural style of messaging or event streaming. First is important to understand that anything can be represented as an event=message e.g new order, status change, confirmation, information from IoT or from monitoring system. Each message can be transport very quickly from the source (producer) into consumer(s). Messages can be changed in the fly - streaming messaging.

Messages can be process exactly at once or at least once. Ordering of messages depends on just configuration setup. 

When comparing it with other messaging and integration platforms, this is one of the best rated. Message store is out of the box functionality. Messages are automatically stored based on parameter setup of retention policy. Messages can remain for longer, which can be configured from a few milliseconds up to years. Scalability and availability of messages can be changed with zero maintenance window.

You don't need extra clusters to achieve high availability for the messaging system like Veritas, PowerHA or other.

One platform for classical messaging, real time messaging, ETL, message streaming. 

ETL can be realised with connectors into external systems which also could run in more instances. Exists a lot of ready to use connectors and new ones can be developed.

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RH
freelance at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

I like Kafka's flexibility, stability, reliability, and robustness.

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it_user998961 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprice Architect

The most important feature for me is the guaranteed delivery of messages from producers to consumers.

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it_user660630 - PeerSpot reviewer
SDET II at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
  • Replication, partitioning, and reliability are the most valuable features.
  • Even if one of my clusters fails, the replication factor of a topic makes sure that I have the data available for processing, so I won't lose any of it.
  • Partitioning enables me to process the parallel requests. It helps in reaching the throughput.
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it_user613983 - PeerSpot reviewer
Java Architect at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

Excellent speeds for publishing messages faster.

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WG
Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

The most valuable feature is the support for a high volume of data.

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Buyer's Guide
Apache Kafka
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Apache Kafka. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.