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Kafka without ZooKeeper

confluent.io

41–50 of 201 posts

Re: Kafka without ZooKeeper

#41
If designing a new system is there any reason to choose Kafka over Pulsar at this point?

Apart from Confluent wanting you to use Kafka so they can keep leeching money off you by hijacking de facto ownership of an open source project, of course.

Re: Kafka without ZooKeeper

#42
post #5
post #2

Kafka is a pretty cool technology, but for every project that I work on, it's never used because it feels like it's overkill (costly and operation heavy). Maybe I should start looking for bigger projects :D

What do you use instead?

Cheap managed cloud services, like AWS SQS and Azure Storage Queue (I usually want some kind of persistence for my queues).

Re: Kafka without ZooKeeper

#43

If designing a new system is there any reason to choose Kafka over Pulsar at this point? Apart from Confluent wanting you to use Kafka so they can keep leeching money off you by hijacking de facto ownership of an open source project, of course.

I think Pulsar is a much better design and further investment in Kafka is a mistake at this point. Kafka have a lot of downside

1- size for single topic limited to the size of one machine 2- complex stateful client library that need to know which machine is currently the master for each partition. ....

Re: Kafka without ZooKeeper

#44

If designing a new system is there any reason to choose Kafka over Pulsar at this point? Apart from Confluent wanting you to use Kafka so they can keep leeching money off you by hijacking de facto ownership of an open source project, of course.

Hijacking seems like a strong word since Jay Kreps is the CEO.

Re: Kafka without ZooKeeper

#46

Finally. I assume there must be good reasons beyond "that's what Hadoop has always used" but philosophically, I never understood why introduce yet another network dependency to handle elections. It really adds up to the operational complexity, from having to manage the Zookeeper cluster to having to fight against DNS.

I wasn't there when they made the call, but "we know it works" seems like it was the key element here.

Re: Kafka without ZooKeeper

#47

If designing a new system is there any reason to choose Kafka over Pulsar at this point? Apart from Confluent wanting you to use Kafka so they can keep leeching money off you by hijacking de facto ownership of an open source project, of course.

This is a very uncharitable take on Confluent.

They contribute heavily to the project and offer enterprise support, professional services, and proprietary tech like Cluster linking.

Source: I am an enterprise customer of Confluent.

Re: Kafka without ZooKeeper

#48
post #44

If designing a new system is there any reason to choose Kafka over Pulsar at this point? Apart from Confluent wanting you to use Kafka so they can keep leeching money off you by hijacking de facto ownership of an open source project, of course.

Hijacking seems like a strong word since Jay Kreps is the CEO.

Fair enough, not hijacking. Just presenting the software as open source then requiring you to pay substantially for features that it’d be irresponsible to use the software in production without (e.g. geo replication via mirror maker).

Add to that their insistence in claiming “exactly once delivery semantics” from Kafka despite that being provably impossible and I don’t see any reason to trust them as a company or pay for their software.

I’ve been sticking to pulsar for all new projects and have yet to hit a single drawback. It scales better, has less fiddly knobs needing adjusting, has cluster management already built in, and supports traditional pub/suv as well as worker queue semantics. It even has Kafka compatible adapters so it’s relatively easy to migrate existing systems.

Kafka played an important role in the history of distributed system design but it’s time to move to something better built and better managed IMO.

Re: Kafka without ZooKeeper

#49

If designing a new system is there any reason to choose Kafka over Pulsar at this point? Apart from Confluent wanting you to use Kafka so they can keep leeching money off you by hijacking de facto ownership of an open source project, of course.

This is a very uncharitable take on Confluent. They contribute heavily to the project and offer enterprise support, professional services, and proprietary tech like Cluster linking. Source: I am an enterprise customer of Confluent.

[deleted]

Re: Kafka without ZooKeeper

#50
post #8

Oh hell yeah! That's great news, tons of work went into this -- props to the contributors! I will take the opportunity to say that Kafka is kind of painful, with or without ZK. Check out NATS! [0]. It doesn't solve all the same problems, but is so much easier to use (during development especially) and can do a lot of the same things. [0]: https://docs.nats.io/whats_new_20

Using Kafka only for ordered pub-sub is like ordering tap water at French Laundry.

In that if you're already there and just want water, it's totally reasonable. It'll get you wet.

If you went there for tap water, yeah, maybe there are better options.

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