Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that offers the ability to process large amounts of data in real-time. Kafka allows you to build real-time applications that can handle high volumes of messages and data.
The primary benefit of using Kafka is that it helps you process and stream data at scale. It’s also very flexible, because it runs on its own cluster, so you don’t have to worry about servers crashing or being down for maintenance.
You can use Kafka with various programming languages including Java, Scala, Python, Ruby and Go among others. However, if you need help setting up Kafka or integrating it with other components in your infrastructure, managed hosting might be the right choice for you.
Shared Hosting Versus Managed Hosting Kafka
The term “managed service” can be misleading. It’s not just about paying for someone to manage your software. It’s a lot more than that, and it can make a big difference in how quickly you can get up and running with Kafka.
Kafka as a Service
There are several managed Kafka services available today: Confluent Cloud from Confluent, Kinesis from Amazon Web Services, Kafka Streams from Apache Kafka, and Flink Kafka Connectors from data Artisans. These platforms offer two main benefits over self-hosting:
They take care of the operational overhead of running Kafka, which is time-consuming and difficult to do right. This includes managing upgrades (which require downtime), monitoring usage patterns, etc.
They provide preconfigured connectors that allow you to easily connect your data sources to your Kafka cluster — e.g., JDBC or REST APIs — without having to write any code yourself.
We’ve been following the open source Apache Kafka project for a while, but one thing that’s still unclear is how it compares to managed services.
In this post, we’ll look at the differences between shared hosting and managed hosting. We’ll also compare Kafka as a service providers, including Confluent Cloud and MESOSCONDUCTOR.
Managed service providers (MSPs) are an emerging trend in the cloud computing space. They provide a managed platform that is scalable, highly available and secure.
Managed hosting allows you to focus on your core business while reducing maintenance costs and increasing scalability. It also reduces your time to market since you won’t have to worry about maintaining your infrastructure at scale.
So, why should you consider Kafka as a managed service?
Kafka is an open-source distributed streaming platform designed to handle real-time data feeds at massive scale. It can be used for multiple purposes such as real-time data analysis, log aggregation, monitoring and much more!
In this blog post we will discuss why Kafka is becoming popular among MSPs and enterprises looking for managed services for their kafka production environments.
As a first step, we need to understand what Kafka is.
Kafka is a distributed stream processing system. It is published by Apache Software Foundation and written in Scala. This open source software has gained much popularity in recent years due to its simplicity and scalability. Stream processing systems are used for building real-time applications that require fast updates of data at any time.
There are two types of Kafka products:
Shared Hosting
Managed Hosting
The most common types of hosting are shared hosting and VPS. The latter is also known as virtual private server (VPS) and provides a more flexible solution to hosting, as it is not shared with other users.
The managed hosting model is one of the most popular choices for companies that want to host their own software applications in the cloud. This type of service includes a dedicated server, which is monitored by the provider at all times.
The main advantage of using managed hosting services is that you can focus on developing your product without having to worry about its technical aspects. In addition, you have access to 24/7 technical support from knowledgeable professionals in case an issue arises.
Kafka as a Service is the most popular way to get started with Apache Kafka. It’s easy to use, scales automatically and can be deployed in a few clicks.
Kafka as a Service is managed by Confluent, the company behind Apache Kafka. That means you get enterprise-grade support, 24/7 monitoring and 99.99% availability.
There are many Kafka managed service providers that offer different pricing models and capabilities. Here are some of the most popular ones:
MSK – MSK offers its own managed service based on Kafka 0.10 (stable), which is currently at version 1.0 (stable). They also offer a free version of their paid service for non-commercial usage (up to 10GB/day).
Confluent – Confluent offers two types of subscription for their managed services: Standard (1GB/day) or Premium (2GB/day). The pricing model includes support and maintenance fees based on your usage levels.
You can use Kafka as a service from several companies. They provide managed Kafka clusters and offer enterprise-grade security, monitoring, backup and recovery capabilities.
The following table shows some of the most popular vendors offering Kafka as a service:
Kafka Pricing
Kafka is not free. You will have to pay for the services provided by vendors such as Confluent, Microsoft, Sumo Logic, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Databricks etc. The pricing ranges from $0.02 per GB per day to $0.05 per GB per day depending on the vendor and configuration requirements.
Kafka, the distributed messaging system, has gained a lot of traction in the last few years, and it’s now seen as a viable alternative to traditional message queuing systems.
Kafka is a publish-subscribe messaging system that stores messages in topics, which are basically a set of messages with a common key. Kafka is designed to be fault tolerant and scalable, so it can handle large amounts of data at high throughputs.
It’s also easy to integrate with other systems: you can use Kafka’s API directly or use one of many client libraries for different languages and frameworks.
Kafka managed service providers
There are several companies that offer managed Kafka services, including Confluent (the company behind Kafka), Amazon and Microsoft Azure. These companies offer hosted versions of Kafka that are running on their infrastructure, so you don’t have to worry about managing servers yourself.
The main advantage of using these managed services is that they offer SLAs (service level agreements) to guarantee uptime and availability. If anything goes wrong with your infrastructure — such as hardware failure — then these SLAs guarantee that downtime will be minimal.
Kafka is a managed service. This means that the Kafka cluster is hosted on a cloud provider and is maintained by a third party. You don’t have to worry about scaling or deploying the software yourself.
The following are some of the most popular providers:
Confluent, an enterprise open source software company, offers Confluent Cloud, a managed Kafka service that scales up to 10K nodes and can be deployed in minutes. The managed service runs on Docker containers and supports multiple versions of Kafka. Its pricing starts at $2,000/month for 2GB of storage and 100GB per day throughput. For higher volumes, you’ll pay $2,500/month for 5GB of storage and 200GB/day throughput; $4,000/month for 10GB of storage and 400GB/day throughput; $6,000 for 20GB of storage and 800GB/day throughput; $8,000 for 40GB of storage and 1TB/day throughput; $12,000 for 80GB of storage and 2TB/day throughput; $16,000 for 160Gbs of storage with 4TB/day throughput; and so on.
Cognitive Scale offers its CognitiveScale Managed Kafka Service as part of its
Confluent, the company behind Kafka, is a managed service provider offering a hosted Kafka service with Confluent Cloud.
The company also offers paid subscription plans that include additional features like SLA and support.
The Confluent Cloud offering is based on Apache Kafka 0.10.2 and offers the following features:
Multiple message producers (including REST API)
Multiple message consumers (including REST API)
Log compaction and replication.