Apache Kafka vs. Apache Sqoop

For brokering messages, Confluent Kafka is well suited since it offers a managed solution ready to use. Scenarios where the solution is not very well suited are for example, where pricing is an issue. The solution costs quite a lot for basic usage (for example: for 3 clusters, pricing is above 100k$ a year).

Incentivized

Sqoop is great for sending data between a JDBC compliant database and a Hadoop environment. Sqoop is built for those who need a few simple CLI options to import a selection of database tables into Hadoop, do large dataset analysis that could not commonly be done with that database system due to resource constraints, then export the results back into that database (or another). Sqoop falls short when there needs to be some extra, customized processing between database extract, and Hadoop loading, in which case Apache Spark's JDBC utilities might be preferred

Incentivized

• Apache Kafka is able to handle a large number of I/Os (writes) using 3-4 cheap servers.
• It scales very well over large workloads and can handle extreme-scale deployments (eg. Linkedin with 300 billion user events each day).
• The same Kafka setup can be used as a messaging bus, storage system or a log aggregator making it easy to maintain as one system feeding multiple applications.

Incentivized

• Provides generalized JDBC extensions to migrate data between most database systems
• Generates Java classes upon reading database records for use in other code utilizing Hadoop's client libraries
• Allows for both import and export features

Incentivized

• The Kafka Tool is a community-made Java application that looks and feels from the past century.
• Logging can be confusing. This certainly shows when we have to do troubleshooting.
• Hybrid scenarios - pub/sub, but there are services in and outside a Kubernetes cluster. Then there are a ~3 options, but only 2 (the harder ones) are production-safe.

Incentivized

• Sqoop2 development seems to have stalled. I have set it up outside of a Cloudera CDH installation, and I actually prefer it's "Sqoop Server" model better than just the CLI client version that is Sqoop1. This works especially well in a microservices environment, where there would be only one place to maintain the JDBC drivers to use for Sqoop.

Incentivized

Kafka has suited our use case very well so far. Going forward we are planning to expand our platform manifold so the load on Kafka and our reliance on Kafka is going to increase only.

Apache Kafka is highly recommended to develop loosely coupled, real-time processing applications. Also, Apache Kafka provides property based configuration. Producer, Consumer and broker contain their own separate property file

Incentivized

Support for Apache Kafka (if willing to pay) is available from Confluent that includes the same time that created Kafka at Linkedin so they know this software in and out. Moreover, Apache Kafka is well known and best practices documents and deployment scenarios are easily available for download. For example, from eBay, Linkedin, Uber, and NYTimes.

Incentivized

Apache Kafka is built for scale. From high throughput and real-time data streaming, it has a strong advantage over RabbitMQ with its low latency. This put Apache Kafka at the forefront as the platform of choice for large datasets messaging and ensuring scalability when data scale up tremendously. RabbitMQ however has its strengths in traditional messaging. Routing and message delivery reliability are the bedrock of RabbitMQ and this is where RabbitMQ excels. In my previous workplace, RabbitMQ was of choice as reliability matters more than scale. In two words. Apache Kafka for scale, RabbitMQ for reliability. And for cloud deployment and large dataset messaging in what I am doing now, Apache Kafka is the default choice.

• Sqoop comes preinstalled on the major Hadoop vendor distributions as the recommended product to import data from relational databases. The ability to extend it with additional JDBC drivers makes it very flexible for the environment it is installed within.
• Spark also has a useful JDBC reader, and can manipulate data in more ways than Sqoop, and also upload to many other systems than just Hadoop.
• Kafka Connect JDBC is more for streaming database updates using tools such as Oracle GoldenGate or Debezium.
• Streamsets and Apache NiFi both provide a more "flow based programming" approach to graphically laying out connectors between various systems, including JDBC and Hadoop.

Incentivized

• Positive: bursts of traffic on special holidays are easy to handle because Kafka can absorb and buffer all the messages we need to process long enough to let an understaffed set of back-end services catch up on processing. Hard to put a number to it but we probably save $5k a month having fewer machines running.
• Positive: makes decoupling the web and API services from the deeper back-end services easier by providing topics as an interface. This allowed us to split up our teams and have them develop independently of each other, speeding up software development.
• Negative: our engineers have made mistakes such as accidentally dropping a few thousand messages due to the CLI being confusing to use, and as a result a customer lost some of their precious data. I'd say that was more our fault than Kafka's though.

Incentivized

• When combined with Cloudera's HUE, it can enable non-technical users to easily import relational data into Hadoop.
• Being able to manipulate large datasets in Hadoop, and them load them into a type of "materialized view" in an external database system has yielded great insights into the Hadoop datalake without continuously running large batch jobs.
• Sqoop isn't very user-friendly for those uncomfortable with a CLI.

Incentivized