Apache Kafka vs. Oracle Integration (OIC)

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.

Oracle Process Cloud is suited for medium-sized companies and up who want to create applications that can automate tasks without the need of recruiting more software developers. With a couple hours of training, any member of the organization's business team will be well-equipped with all of the knowledge that is needed to use Oracle Process Cloud effectively. If your IT team is large and able to take upon the task of making the given application, then something like Oracle BPM is a better solution.

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

• New enhanced activities that are targeted to reduce the integration pain. For example, file stage activity reduces the pain of chunking the input file while sending and mapping the data to the target application. Stage activity takes care of it automatically for the customer. Similarly, recommendation on the mapper is a huge plus for people looking for common integration.
• There are around 50 adapters available including dedicated out of the box application adapters and generic technologies adapters on OICS. The best part of these application adapters is that they are designed considering LOB users. Most of the time integration implementor does not require, application knowledge to perform the integration. OICS has some of Oracle Cloud applications adapters which make integration much easier may not be available in other integration platforms.
• Inbuilt diagnostic dashboard and error hospital makes this product lucrative. OICS also comes with integrated Process Cloud and Visual Builder at the same cost. the customer can have seamless integration with Apiary and SSI on demand.

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

• Currently, it is not retaining the logs for more than 3 days, which it needs to address.
• We also need some functionality inside the interface to re-push the same transaction again so that it will be helpful while testing and fixing the issue.
• Also, some log errors are not giving the correct details. Oracle needs to rectify those.

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

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

The team is proactive and takes the issue up for resolution, they follow continuous development and release.

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

The nearest thing I have used to OIC is UiPath, as it is often used as a tool to integrate software together. However, it is much more suited to legacy software which have little to no API endpoints. If the infrastructure already exists I understand why people use RPA for integration, however for when API's are easily accessible and you're using Oracle tools, OIC is better.

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

• The modern and advanced analytical abilities in Oracle Process Cloud are also a missing element that should be catered to.
• This tool is used greatly for IT departments at a lower level with some very basic and limited access for general employees only.
• Oracle Process Cloud has many advantages like it offers some very great and scalable solutions.
• I find Oracle Process Cloud pretty straightforward and easy as compared to the different options available. Lastly, I think that as it is just one platform, managing the Oracle Process Cloud is pretty easy too.

Incentivized