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AWS Fargate VS Apache Kafka

Compare AWS Fargate VS Apache Kafka and see what are their differences

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AWS Fargate logo AWS Fargate

AWS Fargate is a compute engine for Amazon ECS and EKS that allows you to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters.

Apache Kafka logo Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open-source message broker project developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala.
  • AWS Fargate Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-29
  • Apache Kafka Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-01

AWS Fargate features and specs

  • Simplified Management
    AWS Fargate eliminates the need to provision, configure, and scale clusters of virtual machines, simplifying container management and reducing operational overhead.
  • Scalability
    Fargate automatically scales compute capacity to match the resource requirements of your application, ensuring performance and cost-efficiency.
  • Isolation
    Each Fargate task runs in its own environment, providing better security through enhanced isolation between tasks compared to shared environments.
  • Cost Efficiency
    Fargate allows you to pay only for the resources you actually use, such as vCPU and memory, which can be more cost-effective for unpredictable workloads.
  • Integration
    Fargate integrates seamlessly with other AWS services like Amazon ECS, ECR, IAM, and CloudWatch, providing a cohesive ecosystem for building and deploying applications.

Possible disadvantages of AWS Fargate

  • Higher Cost for Persistent Workloads
    While Fargate can be cost-efficient for variable workloads, it may become more expensive compared to EC2 for long-running, persistent workloads due to its pricing model.
  • Configuration Limitations
    Fargate may have limitations on the customization and configuration options available, which can be restrictive for certain use cases requiring highly specialized setups.
  • Cold Start Latency
    Fargate can experience cold start latency, where newly instantiated containers take a few seconds or longer to become operational, which can be a drawback for latency-sensitive applications.
  • Limited to AWS Ecosystem
    Fargate is tied to AWS's ecosystem, potentially causing vendor lock-in and limiting flexibility if you need to transition to a multi-cloud or hybrid environment.
  • Learning Curve
    For teams not familiar with the AWS ecosystem, there can be a learning curve associated with leveraging Fargate and its integrations effectively.

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.

AWS Fargate videos

Deep Dive into AWS Fargate

More videos:

  • Tutorial - AWS Fargate Tutorial | AWS Tutorial For Beginners | AWS Certification Training | Edureka
  • Review - AWS Fargate - Running Dockerized Apps

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

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to AWS Fargate and Apache Kafka)
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Stream Processing
0 0%
100% 100
Cloud Computing
100 100%
0% 0
Data Integration
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 AWS Fargate and Apache Kafka

AWS Fargate Reviews

Top 12 Kubernetes Alternatives to Choose From in 2023
For Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) Kubernetes alternatives, AWS Fargate is a great option. It is well-known for simplifying container management and deployment on AWS.
Source: humalect.com
Top 10 Best Container Software in 2022
Using AWS Fargate, you now don’t need to provision, configure, and scale cluster virtual machines to execute containers. This, in turn, eliminates the requirement to select server types, determine at what time to scale your clusters or optimize cluster packing.

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

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Apache Kafka should be more popular than AWS Fargate. 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.

AWS Fargate mentions (52)

  • MCP Security: Tr-tr-tr-tricky, tricky, tricky
    The centerpiece of the authentication and authorization is an MCP Auth Service, which runs in a secure virtual private cloud (VPC) on AWS Fargate. MCP Auth Service works with DynamoDB and Cognito to send tokens to the MCP client, routing through the AWS Application Load Balancer and CloudFront. - Source: dev.to / 5 days ago
  • AWS Serverless Compute Offerings: A Comprehensive Developer’s Guide (2025)
    Security: Tasks run in dedicated runtime environments, ensuring workload isolation (AWS Fargate). - Source: dev.to / 11 days ago
  • Large-scale Data Processing with Step Functions : AWS Project
    The workers in this example are containers, running in Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) with an Amazon Fargate Capacity Provider . Though the workers could potentially run almost anywhere so long as they had access to poll the Step Functions Activity and report SUCCESS/FAILURE back to Step Functions. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Ephemeral Jobs Longer than the Lambda Timeout
    One option is to use ECS run-task with a Fargate launch type. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner
    The AWS equivalent to Cloud Run and Container Apps is called Fargate, https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/. - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
View more

Apache Kafka mentions (144)

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What are some alternatives?

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

Google Kubernetes Engine - Google Kubernetes Engine is a powerful cluster manager and orchestration system for running your Docker containers. Set up a cluster in minutes.

RabbitMQ - RabbitMQ is an open source message broker software.

Kubernetes - Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers

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.

Amazon ECS - Amazon EC2 Container Service is a highly scalable, high-performance​ container management service that supports Docker containers.

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