Tradeoffs in Distributed Systems Design: Is Kafka The Best?

When choosing an event streaming platform, Kafka shouldn’t be the only technology you look at. There are a plethora of others in the messaging space today, including open source and proprietary software as well as a range of cloud services. So how do you know you are choosing the right one? A great way to deepen our understanding of event streaming and Kafka is exploring the trade-offs in distributed system design and learning about the choices made by the Kafka project. We’ll look at how Kafka stacks up against other technologies in the space, including traditional messaging systems like Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ as well as more contemporary ones, such as BookKeeper derivatives like Apache Pulsar or Pravega. This talk focuses on the technical details such as difference in messaging models, how data is stored locally as well as across machines in a cluster, when (not) to add tiers to your system, and more. By the end of the talk, you should have a good high-level understanding of how these systems compare and which you should choose for different types of use cases.