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Azure Data Factory VS Kafka Streams

Compare Azure Data Factory VS Kafka Streams and see what are their differences

Azure Data Factory logo Azure Data Factory

Learn more about Azure Data Factory, the easiest cloud-based hybrid data integration solution at an enterprise scale. Build data factories without the need to code.

Kafka Streams logo Kafka Streams

Apache Kafka: A Distributed Streaming Platform.
  • Azure Data Factory Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-01-12
  • Kafka Streams Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-11-21

Azure Data Factory features and specs

  • Scalability
    Azure Data Factory can handle significant data volumes and allows for scaling up or down as needed, making it suitable for both small and complex data integration projects.
  • Integration
    It provides native integration with various Azure services and a wide array of connectors for different data sources, facilitating seamless data flow across platforms.
  • Cost-effective
    The pay-as-you-go pricing model enables cost management by aligning expenses with actual usage patterns, which can be beneficial for budget-conscious projects.
  • Ease of Use
    Offers a user-friendly interface with drag-and-drop features, making it accessible even for users with limited coding experience.
  • Security
    Azure Data Factory includes robust security features like network isolation, access management, and encryption both in-transit and at-rest, ensuring data protection.

Possible disadvantages of Azure Data Factory

  • Complexity
    Managing large and complex data pipelines may require a steep learning curve and expertise in Azure services, which could be a hindrance for non-technical users.
  • Debugging Challenges
    Debugging tasks and identifying error sources in complex ETL processes can be cumbersome, requiring detailed monitoring and analysis.
  • Limited On-Premise Integration
    While ADF offers numerous connectors, integration with certain on-premise data stores might still require additional configuration and setup.
  • Latency Issues
    Data transfer latency can occur when dealing with extremely large datasets or when integrating multiple cloud and on-premise sources.
  • Dependency on Cloud
    As a cloud-based service, performance can be impacted by internet connectivity issues, and consistent access to the cloud is necessary for operations.

Kafka Streams features and specs

  • Scalability
    Kafka Streams is designed to scale horizontally, allowing you to handle large volumes of data by distributing processing across multiple nodes.
  • Integration with Kafka
    Kafka Streams is part of the Apache Kafka ecosystem, providing seamless integration with Kafka topics for both input and output, simplifying data pipeline creation.
  • Exactly-once semantics
    Kafka Streams offers exactly-once processing semantics, which ensures data consistency and accuracy in scenarios where data duplication or loss is unacceptable.
  • Microservices Architecture
    It supports microservices architecture by allowing developers to build lightweight stream processing applications that are easy to deploy and manage.
  • Stateful and Stateless Processing
    Supports both stateful (requiring state storage and access) and stateless processing, providing flexibility in stream processing capabilities.
  • Fault Tolerant
    Kafka Streams is designed to be fault-tolerant, automatically recovering from failures and resuming processing without data loss.

Possible disadvantages of Kafka Streams

  • Complexity
    Setting up and configuring Kafka Streams can be complex, requiring a good understanding of Apache Kafka, stream processing principles, and application logic.
  • Resource Intensive
    Kafka Streams can be resource-intensive, demanding sufficient CPU and memory resources, especially when dealing with high-volume data streams.
  • Java Specific
    Primarily designed for Java applications, which may limit its ease of use for teams or projects that are based in other programming languages.
  • Limited UI Tools
    Lacks advanced UI tools for monitoring and managing stream applications, which can make it challenging for users to oversee and troubleshoot applications.
  • Slow Start-up Time
    Kafka Streams applications can have relatively slow start-up times, which might impact scenarios requiring quick deployment and scaling.

Azure Data Factory videos

Azure Data Factory Tutorial | Introduction to ETL in Azure

More videos:

  • Review - Use Azure Data Factory to copy and transform data
  • Review - Pass summit 2019: Head to Head, SSIS Versus Azure Data Factory

Kafka Streams videos

Spark Streaming Vs Kafka Streams || Which is The Best for Stream Processing?

More videos:

  • Review - Big Data Analytics in Near-Real-Time with Apache Kafka Streams - Allen Underwood
  • Review - Spring Tips: Spring Cloud Stream Kafka Streams

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Azure Data Factory and Kafka Streams)
Data Integration
100 100%
0% 0
Stream Processing
0 0%
100% 100
ETL
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 Azure Data Factory and Kafka Streams

Azure Data Factory Reviews

Best ETL Tools: A Curated List
Azure Data Factory uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model based on several factors, including the number of activities performed, the duration of integration runtime hours, and data movement volumes. This flexible pricing allows for scaling based on workload but can lead to complex cost structures for larger or more complex data integration projects.
Source: estuary.dev
15+ Best Cloud ETL Tools
Azure Data Factory is a fully managed, serverless data integration service by Azure Cloud. You can easily connect to more than 90 built-in data sources without any added cost, allowing for efficient data integration at an enterprise level. Azure's visual platform lets you create ETL and ELT processes without having to write any code.
Source: estuary.dev
Top 8 Apache Airflow Alternatives in 2024
While Apache Airflow focuses on creating tasks and building dependencies between them for workflow automation, Azure Data Factory is suitable for integration tasks. It would be a perfect fit for the construction of the ETL and ELT pipelines for data migration and integration across platforms.
Source: blog.skyvia.com
A List of The 16 Best ETL Tools And Why To Choose Them
Azure Data Factory is a cloud-based ETL service offered by Microsoft used to create workflows that move and transform data at scale.
Top Big Data Tools For 2021
Azure Data Factory is a cloud solution that enables you to integrate data between multiple relational and non-relational sources, transforming it according to your objectives and requirements.

Kafka Streams Reviews

We have no reviews of Kafka Streams yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Kafka Streams should be more popular than Azure Data Factory. It has been mentiond 14 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.

Azure Data Factory mentions (4)

  • Choosing the right, real-time, Postgres CDC platform
    The major infrastructure providers offer CDC products that work within their ecosystem. Tools like AWS DMS, GCP Datastream, and Azure Data Factory can be configured to stream changes from Postgres to other infrastructure. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • (Recommend) Fun Open Source Tool for Pushing Data Around
    You might want to look at Azure Data Factory https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/data-factory/ to extend SSIS EDIT: Yes, I missed the "open source" part :). Source: about 3 years ago
  • Deploying Azure Data Factory using Bicep
    I'm also planning to do more content with Azure Data Factory, so I'd thought it be good to make a video combining the two. - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago
  • Class construction help
    Or, if oyu are using azure then azure data factory https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/data-factory/. Source: almost 4 years ago

Kafka Streams mentions (14)

  • Top 10 Common Data Engineers and Scientists Pain Points in 2024
    Data scientists often prefer Python for its simplicity and powerful libraries like Pandas or SciPy. However, many real-time data processing tools are Java-based. Take the example of Kafka, Flink, or Spark streaming. While these tools have their Python API/wrapper libraries, they introduce increased latency, and data scientists need to manage dependencies for both Python and JVM environments. For example,... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Forward Compatible Enum Values in API with Java Jackson
    We’re not discussing the technical details behind the deduplication process. It could be Apache Flink, Apache Spark, or Kafka Streams. Anyway, it’s out of the scope of this article. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • Kafka Internals - Learn kafka in-depth (Part-1)
    In pub-sub systems, you cannot have multiple services to consume the same data because the messages are deleted after being consumed by one consumer. Whereas in Kafka, you can have multiple services to consume. This opens the door to a lot of opportunities such as Kafka streams, Kafka connect. We’ll discuss these at the end of the series. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Event streaming in .Net with Kafka
    Internally, Streamiz use the .Net client for Apache Kafka released by Confluent and try to provide the same features than Kafka Streams. There is gap between these two library, but the trend is decreasing after each release. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Apache Pulsar vs Apache Kafka - How to choose a data streaming platform
    Both Kafka and Pulsar provide some kind of stream processing capability, but Kafka is much further along in that regard. Pulsar stream processing relies on the Pulsar Functions interface which is only suited for simple callbacks. On the other hand, Kafka Streams and ksqlDB are more complete solutions that could be considered replacements for Apache Spark or Apache Flink, state-of-the-art stream-processing... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Azure Data Factory and Kafka Streams, you can also consider the following products

Workato - Experts agree - we're the leader. Forrester Research names Workato a Leader in iPaaS for Dynamic Integration. Get the report. Gartner recognizes Workato as a “Cool Vendor in Social Software and Collaboration”.

Apache Flink - Flink is a streaming dataflow engine that provides data distribution, communication, and fault tolerance for distributed computations.

DataTap - Adverity is the best data intelligence software for data-driven decision making. Connect to all your sources and harmonize the data across all channels.

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

Apache NiFi - An easy to use, powerful, and reliable system to process and distribute data.

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