What is the difference between Apache kafka vs Act

Question

I am working on Apache Kafka. I want to know which one is better: Kafka or ActiveMQ. What is the main difference between this two technologies? I want to implement Kafka in Spring MVC.

Answer 1

I think one thing that should be noted in a discussion about which brokers to use (and when Kafka comes up) is that the Kafka benchmark that is frequently referenced shows the upper limit of any modern distributed computer. Today's brokers all have about the same total capacity in MB/s. Kafka does extremely well with small messages (10-1024 bytes) when compared to other brokers, but still limits out at around the ~75 Mb/s mark.

There is frequently an apples-to-oranges comparison esp when talking "clustering". ActiveMQ and other enterprise brokers cluster the publishing of messages and the tracking of consumer subscriptions. Kafka clusters the publishing and requires the consumer to track subscription. Seems minimal, but its a significant difference.

All brokers have the same back pressure issues-- Kafka can do a "LAZY PERSISTENCE" where the producer isn't waiting around for the broker to sync to disk.. this is good for a lot of use cases, but probably not the I-care-about-every-single-message scenario ppatierno mentions in his slide show.

Kafka really good for horizontal scaling for things like big data processing of small messages. ActiveMQ is more ideal for the class of use case frequently referred to as enterprise messaging (this is just a term, doesn't mean Kafka isn't good for the enterprise)-- transacted data (although Kafka is adding this).. kiosk.. retail store.. store and forward.. dmz traversal.. data center-to-data center publishing.. etc

Answer 2

Kafka and ActiveMQ may have some overlaps but they were originally designed for different purposes. So comparing them is just like comparing an Apple and an Orange.

Kafka

Kafka is a distributed streaming platform with very good horizontal scaling capability. It allows applications to process and re-process streamed data on disk. Due to it's high throughput it's commonly used for real-time data streaming.

ActiveMQ

ActiveMQ is a general-purpose message broker that supports several messaging protocols such as AMQP, STOMP, MQTT. It supports more complicated message routing patterns as well as the Enterprise Integration Patterns. In general it is mainly used for integration between applications/services especially in a Service Oriented Architecture.

Answer 3

I hear this question every week... While ActiveMQ (like IBM MQ or JMS in general) is used for traditional messaging, Apache Kafka is used as streaming platform (messaging + distributed storage + processing of data). Both are built for different use cases.

You can use Kafka for "traditional messaging", but not use MQ for Kafka-specific scenarios.

The article “Apache Kafka vs. Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)—Friends, Enemies, or Frenemies? (https://www.confluent.io/blog/apache-kafka-vs-enterprise-service-bus-esb-friends-enemies-or-frenemies/)” discusses why Kafka is not competitive but complementary to integration and messaging solutions (including ActiveMQ) and how to integrate both.