Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Apache Kafka VS Amazon Elasticsearch Service

Compare Apache Kafka VS Amazon Elasticsearch Service and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

Apache Kafka logo Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open-source message broker project developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service logo Amazon Elasticsearch Service

Amazon Elasticsearch Service is a managed service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale Elasticsearch in the AWS Cloud.
  • Apache Kafka Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-01
  • Amazon Elasticsearch Service Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-13

Apache Kafka features and specs

  • High Throughput
    Kafka is capable of handling thousands of messages per second due to its distributed architecture, making it suitable for applications that require high throughput.
  • Scalability
    Kafka can easily scale horizontally by adding more brokers to a cluster, making it highly scalable to serve increased loads.
  • Fault Tolerance
    Kafka has built-in replication, ensuring that data is replicated across multiple brokers, providing fault tolerance and high availability.
  • Durability
    Kafka ensures data durability by writing data to disk, which can be replicated to other nodes, ensuring data is not lost even if a broker fails.
  • Real-time Processing
    Kafka supports real-time data streaming, enabling applications to process and react to data as it arrives.
  • Decoupling of Systems
    Kafka acts as a buffer and decouples the production and consumption of messages, allowing independent scaling and management of producers and consumers.
  • Wide Ecosystem
    The Kafka ecosystem includes various tools and connectors such as Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, and KSQL, which enrich the functionality of Kafka.
  • Strong Community Support
    Kafka has strong community support and extensive documentation, making it easier for developers to find help and resources.

Possible disadvantages of Apache Kafka

  • Complex Setup and Management
    Kafka's distributed nature can make initial setup and ongoing management complex, requiring expert knowledge and significant administrative effort.
  • Operational Overhead
    Running Kafka clusters involves additional operational overhead, including hardware provisioning, monitoring, tuning, and scaling.
  • Latency Sensitivity
    Despite its high throughput, Kafka may experience increased latency in certain scenarios, especially when configured for high durability and consistency.
  • Learning Curve
    The concepts and architecture of Kafka can be difficult for new users to grasp, leading to a steep learning curve.
  • Hardware Intensive
    Kafka's performance characteristics often require dedicated and powerful hardware, which can be costly to procure and maintain.
  • Dependency Management
    Managing Kafka's dependencies and ensuring compatibility between versions of Kafka, Zookeeper, and other ecosystem tools can be challenging.
  • Limited Support for Small Messages
    Kafka is optimized for large throughput and can be inefficient for applications that require handling a lot of small messages, where overhead can become significant.
  • Operational Complexity for Small Teams
    Smaller teams might find the operational complexity and maintenance burden of Kafka difficult to manage without a dedicated operations or DevOps team.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service features and specs

  • Scalability
    Amazon OpenSearch Service allows for easy scalability of clusters based on demand, without the need to manually manage infrastructure.
  • Managed Service
    The service is fully managed by AWS, including automatic backups, monitoring, and updates, reducing operational overhead for users.
  • Integration
    Seamless integration with other AWS services such as Amazon VPC, AWS Lambda, and Amazon S3 for streamlined workflows and enhanced data analysis capabilities.
  • Security
    Built-in security features such as VPC support, IAM policies, and data encryption at rest and in transit ensure data is well-protected.
  • High Availability
    The service offers multiple availability zones for high availability and durability of data.
  • Cost Efficiency
    Comes with a pay-as-you-go pricing model which allows users to efficiently manage costs and scale resources according to budget and usage.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon Elasticsearch Service

  • Vendor Lock-in
    Relying on Amazon for Elasticsearch service can lead to vendor lock-in, making it hard to transition to other services or platforms without significant effort.
  • Cost
    While the pricing model is flexible, the costs can accumulate quickly with large-scale deployments, potentially leading to high expenses.
  • Limited Customization
    Being a managed service, it offers less flexibility and customization options compared to self-managed solutions.
  • Version Lag
    The service may not always be in sync with the latest releases and may lag behind the open-source Elasticsearch in terms of new features.
  • Complexity
    Setting up and optimizing Amazon OpenSearch Service can be complex, requiring a good understanding of both the service and underlying Elasticsearch technology.

Apache Kafka videos

Apache Kafka Tutorial | What is Apache Kafka? | Kafka Tutorial for Beginners | Edureka

More videos:

  • Review - Apache Kafka - Getting Started - Kafka Multi-node Cluster - Review Properties
  • Review - 4. Apache Kafka Fundamentals | Confluent Fundamentals for Apache Kafka®
  • Review - Apache Kafka in 6 minutes
  • Review - Apache Kafka Explained (Comprehensive Overview)
  • Review - 2. Motivations and Customer Use Cases | Apache Kafka Fundamentals

Amazon Elasticsearch Service videos

Amazon Elasticsearch Service Deep Dive - AWS Online Tech Talks

More videos:

  • Review - Moving From Self-Managed Elasticsearch to Amazon Elasticsearch Service - AWS Online Tech Talks

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Apache Kafka and Amazon Elasticsearch Service)
Stream Processing
92 92%
8% 8
Custom Search Engine
0 0%
100% 100
Data Integration
100 100%
0% 0
Custom Search
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Apache Kafka and Amazon Elasticsearch Service. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Apache Kafka and Amazon Elasticsearch Service

Apache Kafka Reviews

Best ETL Tools: A Curated List
Debezium is an open-source Change Data Capture (CDC) tool that originated from RedHat. It leverages Apache Kafka and Kafka Connect to enable real-time data replication from databases. Debezium was partly inspired by Martin Kleppmann’s "Turning the Database Inside Out" concept, which emphasized the power of the CDC for modern data pipelines.
Source: estuary.dev
Best message queue for cloud-native apps
If you take the time to sort out the history of message queues, you will find a very interesting phenomenon. Most of the currently popular message queues were born around 2010. For example, Apache Kafka was born at LinkedIn in 2010, Derek Collison developed Nats in 2010, and Apache Pulsar was born at Yahoo in 2012. What is the reason for this?
Source: docs.vanus.ai
Are Free, Open-Source Message Queues Right For You?
Apache Kafka is a highly scalable and robust messaging queue system designed by LinkedIn and donated to the Apache Software Foundation. It's ideal for real-time data streaming and processing, providing high throughput for publishing and subscribing to records or messages. Kafka is typically used in scenarios that require real-time analytics and monitoring, IoT applications,...
Source: blog.iron.io
10 Best Open Source ETL Tools for Data Integration
It is difficult to anticipate the exact demand for open-source tools in 2023 because it depends on various factors and emerging trends. However, open-source solutions such as Kubernetes for container orchestration, TensorFlow for machine learning, Apache Kafka for real-time data streaming, and Prometheus for monitoring and observability are expected to grow in prominence in...
Source: testsigma.com
11 Best FREE Open-Source ETL Tools in 2024
Apache Kafka is an Open-Source Data Streaming Tool written in Scala and Java. It publishes and subscribes to a stream of records in a fault-tolerant manner and provides a unified, high-throughput, and low-latency platform to manage data.
Source: hevodata.com

Amazon Elasticsearch Service Reviews

We have no reviews of Amazon Elasticsearch Service yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Apache Kafka seems to be a lot more popular than Amazon Elasticsearch Service. While we know about 144 links to Apache Kafka, we've tracked only 11 mentions of Amazon Elasticsearch Service. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Apache Kafka mentions (144)

View more

Amazon Elasticsearch Service mentions (11)

  • OpenSearch for humans
    This change triggered a response from Amazon Web Services, which offered OpenSearch (data store and search engine) and OpenSearch Dashboards (visualization and user interface) as Apache2.0 licensed open-source projects. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • OpenSearch as Vector DB: Supercharge Your LLM
    Amazon OpenSearch Service allows you to deploy a secured OpenSearch cluster in minutes. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Building Serverless Applications with AWS - Data
    If yes to these, then OpenSearch is where you are looking. I rarely ever use OpenSearch on its own but usually pair it with DynamoDB. The performance of DDB and the power of searching with OpenSearch make a nice combination. And as with most things with Serverless, pick the right tool for the job. And when it comes to Data, there are so many choices because each one of these is specific to the problem it solves. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Advice on a simple database architecture
    Have you looked into Amazon OpenSearch Service (https://aws.amazon.com/opensearch-service/)? You should be able to load the log files into that service and then query it there. Should simplify things a lot. Source: over 2 years ago
  • AWS Beginner's Key Terminologies
    Elasticsearch (analytics) An open-source, real-time distributed search and analytics engine used for full-text search, structured search, and analytics. OpenSearch was developed by the Elastic company. Amazon OpenSearch Service (OpenSearch Service) is an AWS-managed service for deploying, operating and scaling OpenSearch in the AWS Cloud. Https://aws.amazon.com/opensearch-service/. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Apache Kafka and Amazon Elasticsearch Service, you can also consider the following products

RabbitMQ - RabbitMQ is an open source message broker software.

Amazon Kinesis - Amazon Kinesis services make it easy to work with real-time streaming data in the AWS cloud.

StatCounter - StatCounter is a simple but powerful real-time web analytics service that helps you track, analyse and understand your visitors so you can make good decisions to become more successful online.

PieSync - Seamless two-way sync between your CRM, marketing apps and Google in no time

Histats - Start tracking your visitors in 1 minute!

ElasticSearch - Elasticsearch is an open source, distributed, RESTful search engine.