Apache Kafka vs. SAP Process Control

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.

In my opinion, SAP Process Control is well suited for bigger companies with an already mature Internal Control System as well as for bigger companies who want to completely new/redesign the internal control system. The size of the company, as well as the budget, is quite important when thinking about the implementation of SAP Process Control. A smaller company with e.g., 150 people should think more about implementing SAP FCM.

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

• Native connection to SAP applications
• Automated monitoring process of SAP applications
• Workflow capabilities for control testing

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

• Default delivery of controls could be done by SAP on some basic controls like client openings, password controls, etc
• The messaging or customization of messages in different workflows is limited, which could be introduced to enhance the product
• SAP Process control does not have the capability for cloud product monitoring which is required with more SAP cloud products available right now

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

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 connectivity with other SAP products out of the SAP GRC suite, like Access Control and so on, was key for the decision. Also we had an already mature SAP System landscape as well as having internal processes that were similar to the SAP Process Control standard processes helped us with the decision to implement SAP Process Control.

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

• Automated alerts for controls issues
• Workflow capabilities; however, there's natively only 2 levels of review. More layers would be beneficial.

Incentivized