Apache Kafka vs. Talend Data Integration

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.

This tool fits all kinds of organizations and helps to integrate data between many applications. We can use this tool as data integration is a key feature for all organizations. It is also available in the cloud, which makes the integration more seamless. The firm can opt for the required tools when there are no data integration needs.

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

• Talend Data Integration allows us to quickly build data integrations without a tremendous amount of custom coding (some Java and JavaScript knowledge is still required).
• I like the UI and it's very intuitive. Jobs are visual, allowing the team members to see the flow of the data, without having to read through the Java code that is generated.
• Dynamically table creation from new source.

• 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

• Pricing for sure can be the area for improvement.
• Real time processing is slow as compared to other tools like Abinitio.
• While developing batches, it crashes a lot. It may be the issue with me, but I wanted to highlight it.

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

We use Talend Data Integration day in and day out. It is the best and easiest tool to jump on to and use. We can build a basic integration super-fast. We could build basic integrations as fast as within the hour. It is also easy to build transformations and use Java to perform some operations.

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

Good support, specially when it relates to PROD environment. The support team has access to the product development team. Things are internally escalated to development team if there is a bug encountered. This helps the customer to get quick fix or patch designed for problem exceptions. I have also seen support showing their willingness to help develop custom connector for a newly available cloud based big data solution

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

In comparison with the other ETLs I used, Talend is more flexible than Data Services (where you cannot create complex commands). It is similar to Datastage speaking about commands and interfaces. It is more user-friendly than ODI, which has a metadata point of view on its own, while Talend is more classic. It has both on-prem and cloud approaches, while Matillion is only cloud-based.

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

• It’s only been a positive RoI with Talend given we’ve interfaced large datasets between critical on-Prem and cloud-native apps to efficiently run our business operations.
• 40K+ plots data, covering 1K+ crop varieties.
• 3K+ Customer & their credit data, 3K+ product inventory & pricing.

Incentivized