Apache Kafka vs. Informatica MDM & 360 Applications

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 a robust software with great management and data model. It can be difficult to learn how to use and deploy the first time but the mapping and features work very well and have optimized our productivity and cost savings. We can customize reports, create rules and integrate with other applications. Overall I recommend it.

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

• This program raises us to a professional level where we have better versatility to control all the media of my work and have a correct response for each scenario.
• It is essential to be right about the destination and development of my data, Informatica MDM is here to simplify all these processes for its users.

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

• It is unfortunate how this program has a couple of limitations in terms of insertions; it does not have the ability to agglomerate and archive the data in real-time by groups.
• To have automation functions, the program is very limited in performing one task at a time, compared to other systems that perform functions simultaneously.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Supporting well in managing our huge customer base and managing the customer hierarchies well aligned with transactional processes

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

Strong Customer MDM capabilities for de-duplication, merging, golden record, exposing customer master data. Strong Integration capabilities

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'm not sure since I never used support. My colleagues never had any issues with it, therefore my rating would be an 8 with a certain range of uncertainty.

The integrator did a fair job and even though Business Change Management was complex, it was well concluded on time

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

Informatica MDM has proven it's worth in the organization by driving the revenue growth. It saves our lot of time by filtering out duplicate values and helps in solving critical business problems. It is very helpful when we deal with a lot of data. Apart from this we can populate data on various third party integration which is most useful case

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

• I cannot speak to this for 2 reasons. 1. I am not privy to the financials associated with this implementation or the previous one. 2. We have not hit our 'go-live' for this implementation yet to compare it's performance to our previous solution.

Incentivized