Likelihood to Recommend The Amazon SNS service is well suited to support event notifications, monitoring applications, workflow systems, time-sensitive information updates, and mobile applications that generates or consumes notifications. It can be used to relay time-critical events to mobile applications and devices. It provides significant advantages to developers who build mobile applications that rely on real-time events. It is not well suited for hybrid cross platform mobile application frameworks at this juncture. An optimal version to meet the needs of a cross platform mobile developer is needed as generally the frameworks are not meant to manage real-time events. It is also not suited for cases where the queue management needs improvement or requires special workflows/tooling.
Read full review Apache Kafka is well-suited for most data-streaming use cases. Amazon Kinesis and Azure EventHubs, unless you have a specific use case where using those cloud PaAS for your data lakes, once set up well, Apache Kafka will take care of everything else in the background. Azure EventHubs, is good for cross-cloud use cases, and Amazon Kinesis - I have no real-world experience. But I believe it is the same.
Read full review Pros Built in for quicker setup within AWS ecosystem. Trusted as you control the users and configuration via IAM and easy access controls. Can be sent to S3 simple storage or for long term storage if required. Can be used in many regions, same configs. Read full review Really easy to configure. I've used other message brokers such as RabbitMQ and compared to them, Kafka's configurations are very easy to understand and tweak. Very scalable: easily configured to run on multiple nodes allowing for ease of parallelism (assuming your queues/topics don't have to be consumed in the exact same order the messages were delivered) Not exactly a feature, but I trust Kafka will be around for at least another decade because active development has continued to be strong and there's a lot of financial backing from Confluent and LinkedIn, and probably many other companies who are using it (which, anecdotally, is many). Read full review Cons At times you receive access denied errors which are annoying. Rarely do you receive internal failure errors where you can't access the information. It is rare but it does happen. You are required to add an MWS Authentication Token every so often. I wish it would pull that information automatically for you so you don't have to go searching for it. Read full review Sometimes it becomes difficult to monitor our Kafka deployments. We've been able to overcome it largely using AWS MSK, a managed service for Apache Kafka, but a separate monitoring dashboard would have been great. Simplify the process for local deployment of Kafka and provide a user interface to get visibility into the different topics and the messages being processed. Learning curve around creation of broker and topics could be simplified Read full review Likelihood to Renew Kafka is quickly becoming core product of the organization, indeed it is replacing older messaging systems. No better alternatives found yet
Read full review Usability It is useful for applications developed using event driven architecture. It helps in tracking and logging the events in a very timely and efficient manner. The dashboards are a little difficult to implement. But overall it is very easy to integrate with other AWS services like Lambda, API GW, S3 and DynamoDB. The permissions to access should be resolved before using it.
Read full review Apache Kafka is highly recommended to develop loosely coupled, real-time processing applications. Also, Apache Kafka provides property based configuration. Producer, Consumer and broker contain their own separate property file
Read full review Support Rating Amazon Simple Notification Sevices (SNS) support depends on your usage pattern and definitely on your support plan as an enterprise with AWS. Before reaching out to support you should read their documentation, as they have mentioned almost all the common issues and their solutions there. However, for specific issues, they generally respond in 1-2 business days.
Read full review Support for Apache Kafka (if willing to pay) is available from Confluent that includes the same time that created Kafka at Linkedin so they know this software in and out. Moreover, Apache Kafka is well known and best practices documents and deployment scenarios are easily available for download. For example, from eBay, Linkedin, Uber, and NYTimes.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Amazon’s SNS is incredibly easy to set up compared to the more powerful, but complex, Kafka flavours. SNS’s core advantages are – · no setup/no maintenance · either a queue (SQS) or a topic (SNS) · various limitations (on size, how long a message lives, etc) · limited throughput: you can do batch and concurrent requests, but still achieving high throughputs would be expensive · SNS has notifications for email, SMS, SQS, HTTP built-in. · no "message stream" concept Overall, it would be the best choice to get into the concepts of Pub/Sub concepts as although it has limitations it can provide significant capabilities and solutions
Read full review I used other messaging/queue solutions that are a lot more basic than Confluent Kafka, as well as another solution that is no longer in the market called Xively, which was bought and "buried" by Google. In comparison, these solutions offer way fewer functionalities and respond to other needs.
Read full review Return on Investment Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) saved us a lot of extra coding time by providing straightforward functionality we needed in our ad campaign automation tool. Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) allows us to maintain a consistent, serverless model within our applications. Read full review Positive: Get a quick and reliable pub/sub model implemented - data across components flows easily. Positive: it's scalable so we can develop small and scale for real-world scenarios Negative: it's easy to get into a confusing situation if you are not experienced yet or something strange has happened (rare, but it does). Troubleshooting such situations can take time and effort. Read full review ScreenShots