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Apache Kafka VS Hadoop

Compare Apache Kafka VS Hadoop and see what are their differences

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Apache Kafka logo Apache Kafka

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

Hadoop logo Hadoop

Open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing
  • Apache Kafka Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-01
  • Hadoop Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-17

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.

Hadoop features and specs

  • Scalability
    Hadoop can easily scale from a single server to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage.
  • Cost-Effective
    It utilizes a distributed infrastructure, allowing you to use low-cost commodity hardware to store and process large datasets.
  • Fault Tolerance
    Hadoop automatically maintains multiple copies of all data and can automatically recover data on failure of nodes, ensuring high availability.
  • Flexibility
    It can process a wide variety of structured and unstructured data, including logs, images, audio, video, and more.
  • Parallel Processing
    Hadoop's MapReduce framework enables the parallel processing of large datasets across a distributed cluster.
  • Community Support
    As an Apache project, Hadoop has robust community support and a vast ecosystem of related tools and extensions.

Possible disadvantages of Hadoop

  • Complexity
    Setting up, maintaining, and tuning a Hadoop cluster can be complex and often requires specialized knowledge.
  • Overhead
    The MapReduce model can introduce additional overhead, particularly for tasks that require low-latency processing.
  • Security
    While improvements have been made, Hadoop's security model is considered less mature compared to some other data processing systems.
  • Hardware Requirements
    Though it can run on commodity hardware, Hadoop can still require significant computational and storage resources for larger datasets.
  • Lack of Real-Time Processing
    Hadoop is mainly designed for batch processing and is not well-suited for real-time data analytics, which can be a limitation for certain applications.
  • Data Integrity
    Distributed systems face challenges in maintaining data integrity and consistency, and Hadoop is no exception.

Analysis of Hadoop

Overall verdict

  • Hadoop is a robust and powerful data processing platform that is well-suited for organizations that need to manage and analyze large-scale data. Its resilience, scalability, and open-source nature make it a popular choice for big data solutions. However, it may not be the best fit for all use cases, especially those requiring real-time processing or where ease of use is a priority.

Why this product is good

  • Hadoop is renowned for its ability to store and process large datasets using a distributed computing model. It is scalable, cost-effective, and efficient in handling massive volumes of data across clusters of computers. Its ecosystem includes a wide range of tools and technologies like HDFS, MapReduce, YARN, and Hive that enhance data processing and analysis capabilities.

Recommended for

  • Organizations dealing with vast amounts of data needing efficient batch processing.
  • Businesses that require scalable storage solutions to manage their data growth.
  • Companies interested in leveraging a diverse ecosystem of data processing tools and technologies.
  • Technical teams that have the expertise to manage and optimize complex distributed systems.

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

Hadoop videos

What is Big Data and Hadoop?

More videos:

  • Review - Product Ratings on Customer Reviews Using HADOOP.
  • Tutorial - Hadoop Tutorial For Beginners | Hadoop Ecosystem Explained in 20 min! - Frank Kane

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Apache Kafka and Hadoop)
Stream Processing
100 100%
0% 0
Databases
45 45%
55% 55
Data Integration
100 100%
0% 0
Big Data
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

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

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

Hadoop Reviews

A List of The 16 Best ETL Tools And Why To Choose Them
Companies considering Hadoop should be aware of its costs. A significant portion of the cost of implementing Hadoop comes from the computing power required for processing and the expertise needed to maintain Hadoop ETL, rather than the tools or storage themselves.
16 Top Big Data Analytics Tools You Should Know About
Hadoop is an Apache open-source framework. Written in Java, Hadoop is an ecosystem of components that are primarily used to store, process, and analyze big data. The USP of Hadoop is it enables multiple types of analytic workloads to run on the same data, at the same time, and on a massive scale on industry-standard hardware.
5 Best-Performing Tools that Build Real-Time Data Pipeline
Hadoop is an open-source framework that allows to store and process big data in a distributed environment across clusters of computers using simple programming models. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage. Rather than relying on hardware to deliver high-availability, the library itself is...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Apache Kafka should be more popular than Hadoop. It has been mentiond 144 times since March 2021. 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)

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Hadoop mentions (25)

  • Apache Hadoop: Open Source Business Model, Funding, and Community
    This post provides an in‐depth look at Apache Hadoop, a transformative distributed computing framework built on an open source business model. We explore its history, innovative open funding strategies, the influence of the Apache License 2.0, and the vibrant community that drives its continuous evolution. Additionally, we examine practical use cases, upcoming challenges in scaling big data processing, and future... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • What is Apache Kafka? The Open Source Business Model, Funding, and Community
    Modular Integration: Thanks to its modular approach, Kafka integrates seamlessly with other systems including container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes and third-party tools such as Apache Hadoop. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • India Open Source Development: Harnessing Collaborative Innovation for Global Impact
    Over the years, Indian developers have played increasingly vital roles in many international projects. From contributions to frameworks such as Kubernetes and Apache Hadoop to the emergence of homegrown platforms like OpenStack India, India has steadily carved out a global reputation as a powerhouse of open source talent. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Unveiling the Apache License 2.0: A Deep Dive into Open Source Freedom
    One of the key attributes of Apache License 2.0 is its flexible nature. Permitting use in both proprietary and open source environments, it has become the go-to choice for innovative projects ranging from the Apache HTTP Server to large-scale initiatives like Apache Spark and Hadoop. This flexibility is not solely legal; it is also philosophical. The license is designed to encourage transparency and maintain a... - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Apache Hadoop: Pioneering Open Source Innovation in Big Data
    Apache Hadoop is more than just software—it’s a full-fledged ecosystem built on the principles of open collaboration and decentralized governance. Born out of a need to process vast amounts of information efficiently, Hadoop uses a distributed file system and the MapReduce programming model to enable scalable, fault-tolerant computing. Central to its success is a diverse ecosystem that includes influential... - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Apache Kafka and Hadoop, you can also consider the following products

RabbitMQ - RabbitMQ is an open source message broker software.

Apache Spark - Apache Spark is an engine for big data processing, with built-in modules for streaming, SQL, machine learning and graph processing.

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.

PostgreSQL - PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system.

Histats - Start tracking your visitors in 1 minute!

Apache Storm - Apache Storm is a free and open source distributed realtime computation system.