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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Spotfire Streaming
Score 8.0 out of 10
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The Spotfire Streaming (formerly TIBCO Streaming or StreamBase) platform is a high-performance system for rapidly building applications that analyze and act on real-time streaming data. Using Spotfire Streaming, users can rapidly build real-time systems and deploy them at a fraction of the cost and risk of other alternatives.
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Apache Kafka
Spotfire Streaming
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Apache Kafka
Spotfire Streaming
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Yes
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Yes
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Apache Kafka
Spotfire Streaming
Considered Both Products
Apache Kafka
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Spotfire Streaming
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Chose Spotfire Streaming
We are using Dataflow (by Google).The development time in Spotfire Streaming is definitely shorter because its GUI based. Dataflow handles late arrivals after the window closes, not sure Spotfire Streaming can do that. Dataflow can run GCP as a managed service which is why we …
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.
Taking data from various sources including files, databases, web services, applying some complex rules, transforming, aggregating and producing a result. This is what Spotfire Streaming does best. - If one needs connectivity to special services as secured databases or web services, building interactive web apps, those are probably tasks that shall be addressed with different tools.
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.
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.
We are using Dataflow (by Google).The development time in Spotfire Streaming is definitely shorter because its GUI based. Dataflow handles late arrivals after the window closes, not sure Spotfire Streaming can do that. Dataflow can run GCP as a managed service which is why we chose that tool for our new product.
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.
While we haven't specifically integrated Spotfire Streaming into our product development, it has allowed us to see the benefits of real-time streaming data.
We have much more visibility into how our longer term roadmap will look and what we should focus on.
