Apache Kafka is an open-source stream processing platform developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala and Java. The Kafka event streaming platform is used by thousands of companies for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications.
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IBM Aspera on Cloud
Score 8.1 out of 10
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IBM Aspera on Cloud is a hosted service of IBM Aspera. Rather than just optimizing or accelerating data transfer, IBM Aspera’s high-speed data transfer fully utilizes available network bandwidth to maximize speed and scale up with no theoretical limit, without impacting other network traffic. According to the vendor, the solution drives unmatched transfer speeds, end-to-end security, reliability, and exceptional bandwidth control. IBM Aspera on Cloud also offers file…
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 is best suited to products and companies which extensively use IBM cloud and other cloud hosted services by IBM. This is because since the existing interface is a little challenging to use, IBM's own products and platform is well integrated with IBM Aspera on Cloud and there's relatively little work for the integration team
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).
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
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
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.
The support from IBM is fast and reliable. Very knowledgeable engineers provide you with the support on Aspera. We had a very good experience when opened tickets and we were able to get our issues resolved quickly. Most solutions are provided within a day so you can expect a quick turnaround time. Overall, the support has been very good.
The service provided by the authorized vendor was excellent. It was a good collaboration between the vendor IT team and internal IT team. They provided us with a timeline and we verified and approved that timeline. Daily stand ups and weekly meetups were conducted to update the internal team on progress. They were able to deliver all deliverables on time also, they conducted both alpha testing and beta version testing in time. Overall, they were able to complete the implementation in the given timeline.
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.
Aspera comes with IBM cloud so there isn’t really a choice. Since it’s built-in, it integrates well and there was no need to buy another solution. Therefore, I did not consider other options. It worked fine, gave access files, push data securely, and did it faster than standard HTTPS.
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.
Aspera has changed the way we do business. We are now able to share huge file sets electronically, saving on external drives, shipping costs, time, and effort.
Our industry is very slow to commit to electronic alternatives to physical media. In less than three years, the positive results of using this service have caused over 70% of our user base to fully commit to electronic delivery, with the number of physical fulfillments quickly being driven toward zero.
Transfers within our own company, which formerly relied solely on FTP/HTTP transfer drives that would take days now take minutes with Aspera. Our software team relies on the speed and accuracy of the transfers.
