Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review BizTalk is well suited as middleware. Where you wish to translate an input file into an output file and send it to some endpoint. In our case, we used it to convert and send files to SAP. In many ways, it very flexible, and you can do almost anything you want with it. In many ways, it's a better solution than your SAP XI or PI as middleware, since it's much less expensive, and allows you do interface with non-SAP systems.
Read full review Pros 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). Read full review It is very user friendly. Users can change rules during run time and change workflow. Huge capacity for queueing messages. It supports all types of adapters like Oracle, Salesforce, SMTP, FTP, etc. Also users can built custom adaptors. If users want to dynamically deploy their solution without any downtime, this is a perfect solution. BizTalk will be a good fit, especially for public-facing websites. Well-proven in the market. I used it when developing a website for Virgin Trains, catering more than 800K user requests per day. Helps in load balancing. Read full review Cons 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 Read full review Microsoft BizTalk is over engineered for some situtations Microsoft BizTalk can be frustrating to use as it forces you to use the GUI as opposed to code Microsoft BizTalk is very resource intensive to create integrations Read full review Likelihood to Renew Kafka is quickly becoming core product of the organization, indeed it is replacing older messaging systems. No better alternatives found yet
Read full review BizTalk will always be required at this hospital.
Greg Walia Technical and Application Support Specialist
Read full review Usability 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
Read full review I gave a 7 because this product BizTalk does need time and training to get familiar with the usability and features, it is not that easy to use.
Greg Walia Technical and Application Support Specialist
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review BizTalk Server has been supported for more than 15 years. It is well proven in the market. Microsoft has provided excellent support with technical issues.
Read full review Implementation Rating Make sure you have everybody and all depts. On board during testing on test server.
Greg Walia Technical and Application Support Specialist
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review BizTalk was selected here mainly because it is easy to integrate to a .NET application (most of them are Web Service, WCF SOAP, WCF REST and Web API) and many backend databases are
Microsoft SQL Server . Another benefit is that the monitoring job is easy to set up and centralize with other .NET application monitoring jobs.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review A positive impact has been the quicker turnaround time of a part request and that part showing up in SAP using Biztalk as middleware. A somewhat negative impact has been the somewhat insufficient error logging/message capture settings that Biztalk provide. This has caused occasional delays when attempted to create parts for the business. A somewhat negative impact has been the need to have a specialized developer who understands Biztalk to troubleshoot issues with the Biztalk and SAP interaction when creating parts, and when adding new fields to the parts. Read full review ScreenShots