Apache Kafka vs. Contentful

Apache Kafka is well-suited for most data-streaming use cases. Amazon Kinesis and Azure EventHubs, unless you have a specific use case where using those cloud PaAS for your data lakes, once set up well, Apache Kafka will take care of everything else in the background. Azure EventHubs, is good for cross-cloud use cases, and Amazon Kinesis - I have no real-world experience. But I believe it is the same.

It's a great all rounder for content projects. It's easy in the basics and powerful in the complex, data heavy scenarios. Extending the platform is straightforward and the SDK gives you everything you need. If you have many many varying content types , it gets expensive and perhaps not the best choice .

Incentivized

• Really easy to configure. I've used other message brokers such as RabbitMQ and compared to them, Kafka's configurations are very easy to understand and tweak.
• Very scalable: easily configured to run on multiple nodes allowing for ease of parallelism (assuming your queues/topics don't have to be consumed in the exact same order the messages were delivered)
• Not exactly a feature, but I trust Kafka will be around for at least another decade because active development has continued to be strong and there's a lot of financial backing from Confluent and LinkedIn, and probably many other companies who are using it (which, anecdotally, is many).

Incentivized

• Flexible. This CMS can be easily extended and provide access to dynamic content
• Simple. The WYSWG is very easy to work with and identifying pages and content in the system is fairly easy
• Clean Interface. The interface is clean and uncluttered keeping focus on the content and not other factors.

Incentivized

• Sometimes it becomes difficult to monitor our Kafka deployments. We've been able to overcome it largely using AWS MSK, a managed service for Apache Kafka, but a separate monitoring dashboard would have been great.
• Simplify the process for local deployment of Kafka and provide a user interface to get visibility into the different topics and the messages being processed.
• Learning curve around creation of broker and topics could be simplified

• Contentful uses "references" to allow you to build very modular content. If I have a "slider" content type, I can create a "slide" content type which references a "button" content type, and so forth. This works well, but I occasionally wish there was a better solution for one-off content, like a settings page. Currently, this is done for creating an entire content type called "settings" with a single entry. Not a big deal, but not ideal, either.
• There are a few quirks with GatsbyJS integration, etc, but these issues are being fixed and improved upon very quickly.
• A minor gripe, but Contentful does not have a way to organize fields within an entry. Entries with many fields are somewhat tiresome to scroll through.

Incentivized

Kafka is quickly becoming core product of the organization, indeed it is replacing older messaging systems. No better alternatives found yet

Incentivized

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

It is a very easy to use and configure application. I find that it is on the user to manage the content after the models have been created, yet I still do not encounter issues finding or creating new components for our site. It is easy to set up and easy to navigate.

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

I used other messaging/queue solutions that are a lot more basic than Confluent Kafka, as well as another solution that is no longer in the market called Xively, which was bought and "buried" by Google. In comparison, these solutions offer way fewer functionalities and respond to other needs.

Incentivized

Easy to use and much more organized as a single platform versus multi. The layout is clean and easy to read and we don’t have to worry about certain users safe guarding data or content then losing it when they leave the company. It’s a one stop shop for imagery

Incentivized

• Positive: Get a quick and reliable pub/sub model implemented - data across components flows easily.
• Positive: it's scalable so we can develop small and scale for real-world scenarios
• Negative: it's easy to get into a confusing situation if you are not experienced yet or something strange has happened (rare, but it does). Troubleshooting such situations can take time and effort.

Incentivized

• Contentful has saved us valuable development time that was previously spent doing deploys for minor content updates.
• Contentful has helped us maintain consistent documentation, reducing time needed to review for consistency.
• Can't say we've really experienced any negative ROI impacts from using Contentful, but we've run into some limitations in adding too many content models and the next pricing tier is substantially more expensive.

Incentivized