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Kafka is dead, long live Kafka

warpstream.com

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Re: Kafka is dead, long live Kafka

#131

> In our experience, Kafka is one of the most polarizing technologies in the data space. Some people hate it, some people swear by it, but almost every technology company uses it. (emphasis added) Surely that's false? Or, I mean, neither of us are providing any evidence here... For my part, 0 of the last 6 companies I've worked for used it. The company before that did (I drove its adoption), but we later abandoned it…

I’m not sure how anyone can hate Kafka? It does what it says on the tin - move data from A to B with publish/subscribe semantics. It’s quite easy to just use it as a dumb message broker with no retention if that’s all you need but if you do want to do something funky with persistence then go down that route. I’m not sure how anyone could have a negative feeling towards a vanilla, but rock solid and wildly popular ope…

(WarpStream co-founder)

I'm not sure what you mean. Message persistence is a fundamental feature of Kafka that almost everyone using it relies on, its not some esoteric feature no one uses. We're each coming from our own network bias here, but in my experience a lot of people are really unhappy with the operational toil associated with running Kafka at scale in production.

Re: Kafka is dead, long live Kafka

#133
post #96

I wonder, will we have any solution for local development? Or we always will depend on closed control plane?

(WarpStream co-founder) We're thinking about making the `warpstream playground` command run an in-memory local version of control plane. Come chat with us in our Slack or Discord if you want to discuss more!

Re: Kafka is dead, long live Kafka

#134
post #89

Haven’t seen it mentioned yet so I’ll just say we use Kinesis Data Streams with enhanced fanout at work and it seems very minimal in terms of operational overhead if it fits your needs.

(WarpStream co-founder) Yeah if you can fit your workload into it, it's pretty solid from an operational perspective since AWS manages the whole thing (except scaling up shards and stuff like that).

It gets pretty pricey though for large volumes of Data.

Re: Kafka is dead, long live Kafka

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(WarpStream co-founder) Yeah our P99 for producer latency is ~400ms right now.

Sounds like you're currently optimized for throughput, not latency. (I work with customers for whom 10ms of latency for a 128kB write is too high.) What are your plans to improve latency?

(WarpStream co-founder)

None currently, if you need latency that low WarpStream is not a good fit and you should probably stick with something more traditional like a very well tuned Kafka cluster.

Re: Kafka is dead, long live Kafka

#136
So the idea is that S3 offers practically unlimited throughput, so we can certainly use S3 for a scalable queue? I wish the open-source community could have something competing with S3, but then S3 has made it really hard for companies to have a convincing justification to build their own alternative[1].

[1] There are a few alternatives, such as Apache Ozone, Ceph, and Good'ol HDFS, but none seems have an accelerating momentum for S3's workload.

Re: Kafka is dead, long live Kafka

#137
post #69
post #16

Well, one thing's for sure. Running Kafka on discrete VMs on a cloud provider "by the book" is ludicrously expensive. I remember having a very simple discussion with quite a few customers about both Kafka and Hadoop that boiled down to this: Why replicate data at the VM/disk level when those disks are already provided as a fully redundant system? (in this case it was Azure storage, which provides locally, redundant,…

> Why replicate data at the VM/disk level when those disks are already provided as a fully redundant system? Azure disk replications are for the durability of the data, not the avalability of the data from a kafka perspective.

Managed disks reside on redundant and high availability storage.

Re: Kafka is dead, long live Kafka

#139

> In our experience, Kafka is one of the most polarizing technologies in the data space. Some people hate it, some people swear by it, but almost every technology company uses it. (emphasis added) Surely that's false? Or, I mean, neither of us are providing any evidence here... For my part, 0 of the last 6 companies I've worked for used it. The company before that did (I drove its adoption), but we later abandoned it…

I’m not sure how anyone can hate Kafka? It does what it says on the tin - move data from A to B with publish/subscribe semantics. It’s quite easy to just use it as a dumb message broker with no retention if that’s all you need but if you do want to do something funky with persistence then go down that route. I’m not sure how anyone could have a negative feeling towards a vanilla, but rock solid and wildly popular ope…

Easy: I hate how complex it is, compared to something much simpler like https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQS...

Re: Kafka is dead, long live Kafka

#140
post #138

Care to summarize the 'contact us' pricing?

We're aiming for per-GB usage-based pricing that is significantly cheaper than the alternatives, but the BYOC model combined with our extremely efficient cloud control plane gives us a lot of flexibility here. That's why we can offer a free tier at all.

We're mostly just not sure yet, so your input would be appreciated.

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