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Why was Apache Kafka created?

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Re: Why was Apache Kafka created?

#51
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I previously helped clients setup and run Kafka clusters. Why they'd need Kafka was always our first question, never got a good answer from a single one of them. That's not to say that Kafka isn't useful, it is, in the right setting, but that settings is never "I need a queue". If you need a queue, great, go get RabbitMQ, ZMQ, Redis, SQS, named pipes, pretty anything but Kafka. It's not that Kafka can't do it, but yo…

> Why they'd need Kafka was always our first question, never got a good answer from a single one of them "To follow the hype train, Bro" is often the real answer. > If you need a queue, great, go get RabbitMQ, ZMQ, Redis, SQS, named pipes, pretty anything but Kafka. Or just freaking MQTT. MQTT has been battle-proven for 25 years, is simple and does perfectly the job if you do not ship GBs of blobs through your messag…

It's resume-driven development. It honestly can make sense for both company and employee.

Companies get standard tech stacks people are happy to work with, because working with them gets people experience with tech stacks that are standard at many companies. It's a virtuous cycle.

And sure even if you need just a specific thing, it's often better to go slightly overkill for something that's got millions of stack overflow solutions for common issues figured out. Vs picking some niche thing that you are now 1 of like six total people in the entire world using in prod.

Obviously the dose makes the poison and don't use kafka for your small internal app thing and don't use k8s where docker will do, but also, probably use k8s if you need more than docker instead of using some weird other thing nobody will know about.

Re: Why was Apache Kafka created?

#52
post #31
post #18

Does anyone use https://nats.io here? I have heard good things about it. I would love to hear about the comparisons between nats.io and kafka

I got really pissed off with their field CTO for essentially trying to pull the wool over my eyes regarding performance and reliability. Essentially their base product (NATs) has a lot of performance but trades it off for reliability. So they add Jetstream to NATs to get reliability, but use the performance numbers of pure NATs. I got burned by MongoDB for doing this to me, I won’t work with any technology that is ma…

Don't implement any distributive technology until aphyr has put it through the paces, and even then... Pilot

Re: Why was Apache Kafka created?

#53
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and it feels bloated (Java!) I'm curious, what exactly feels bloated about Java? I don't feel like the Java language or runtime are particularly bloated, so I'm guessing you're referring to some practices/principles that you often see around Java software?

Whatever efficiency may hypothetically be possible with Java, you can in-fact spot a real world Java program in the wild by looking for the thing taking up 10x the memory it seems like it should need… when idle. Yes yes I’m sure there are exceptions somewhere but I’ve been reading Java fans using benchmarks to try to convince me that I can’t tell which programs on my computer are Java just by looking for the weirdly…

"Java is bloated because I only look at the bloated examples."

Is C++ bloated because of the memory Chrome uses?

Re: Why was Apache Kafka created?

#54
post #38
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and it feels bloated (Java!) I'm curious, what exactly feels bloated about Java? I don't feel like the Java language or runtime are particularly bloated, so I'm guessing you're referring to some practices/principles that you often see around Java software?

> I'm curious, what exactly feels bloated about Java? Everything. Why do you think Kubernetes is NOT written in Java?

... Because it came from Google?

Golang has little to distinguish itself technically. It has a more modern std lib (for now) and isn't Oracle.

Which aren't trivial, but they aren't Trump cards.

Re: Why was Apache Kafka created?

#55
post #31
post #18

Does anyone use https://nats.io here? I have heard good things about it. I would love to hear about the comparisons between nats.io and kafka

I got really pissed off with their field CTO for essentially trying to pull the wool over my eyes regarding performance and reliability. Essentially their base product (NATs) has a lot of performance but trades it off for reliability. So they add Jetstream to NATs to get reliability, but use the performance numbers of pure NATs. I got burned by MongoDB for doing this to me, I won’t work with any technology that is ma…

You mean Jetstream?

Can you point to where they are using core NATS numbers to describe Jetstream?

Re: Why was Apache Kafka created?

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java the language and Java the runtime are fine. The way most Java code is written is terrible Enterprise factory factory factory.

But the perf is not reliable. If you want latency and throughput, idiomatic Rust will give you better properties. Interestingly even will Go for some reason has better latency guarantees I believe even though it’s GC is worse than Java.

This presupposes the use case is such that this even matters. Obviously that is the case sometimes, but in the vast majority of cases it is not.

Re: Why was Apache Kafka created?

#57
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you know why you don’t see many non-Java programs on your computer taking up 10x memory? because no one uses them to write anything :) jokes aside, we got a shift in the industry where many java programs were replaced by electron-like programs which now take 20x memory

[flagged]

conflicts are a necessary evil with a massive dependency ecosystem

Re: Why was Apache Kafka created?

#58
post #35
post #6

Startup founder here -- we tried it, and it feels bloated (Java!), bureaucratic and overcomplicated for what it is. Something like Redis queues or even ZMQ probably suffices for 90% of use cases. Maybe in hyper-scaled applications that need to be ultraperformant (e.g., realtime trading, massive streaming platforms) is where Kafka comes into play.

> Maybe in hyper-scaled applications that need to be ultraperformant (e.g., realtime trading, massive streaming platforms) is where Kafka comes into play. Kafka is used because the Java folks don't want to learn something new due to job security, even though there are faster and compatible alternatives that exist today. Rather use Redpanda, than continue to use Kafka and then complain about how resource intensive it…

I thought Kafka ditched the zookeeper

Re: Why was Apache Kafka created?

#59
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What off the shelf tools in 2012 would you propose, exactly?

Make it less event-orchestrated and use a db. It’s just a social network for recruiters it’s not as complicated as they like to pretend. You don’t need push, it’s just a performance optimization that almost never justifies using a whole new tool.

Your solution to a queue and publish subscribe problem is to use a database?

Re: Why was Apache Kafka created?

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever efficiency may hypothetically be possible with Java, you can in-fact spot a real world Java program in the wild by looking for the thing taking up 10x the memory it seems like it should need… when idle. Yes yes I’m sure there are exceptions somewhere but I’ve been reading Java fans using benchmarks to try to convince me that I can’t tell which programs on my computer are Java just by looking for the weirdly…

you know why you don’t see many non-Java programs on your computer taking up 10x memory? because no one uses them to write anything :) jokes aside, we got a shift in the industry where many java programs were replaced by electron-like programs which now take 20x memory

Technically kind of true but at the same time Android apps are predominantly Java/Kotlin. It speaks more to Java just having a bad desktop story. But it’s also why Android devices need 2x the ram
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