Kafka vs RabbitMQ is one decision that is sure to be pivotal to your end result, so read on to find out more about both so that you are well-informed.
Kafka is one of the leading message brokers available, as it can scale up to 100000 msg/sec on a single server, and you can also add more hardware if you wish. The system is optimised to work with speed, and fast customers are always treated well by it. The main limitation of Kafka is that one partition can deal only with a single logical consumer, so working with slow processing can be exceedingly difficult for the system to process.
RabbitMQ supports a large number of development platforms, and it is quite easy to use too. The scalability of the platform is up to 20000 messages per second, using a single server. You will have to add more servers past that point if you want to scale up. RabbitMQ works well with fast consumers, and slow processing too, unlike Kafka.
RabbitMQ vs Apache Kafka
In a single sentence, Kafka can be said to be message bus optimised for data streams. RabbitMQ, on the other hand, is more meant to be used as a general use message broker, which has the capability to support a host of other protocols like AMQP and the likes.
Kafka was developed in Scala, by LinkedIn. It started out as a method to connect a lot of the internal systems in the organisation, and the Apache Software Foundation decided to adopt the products which the organisation had developed. It is extremely useful when the architecture is event-driven.
RabbitMQ, on the other hand, was originally developed to put AMQP to use. Java already had messaging standards like the JMS, so it was written in Erlang in order to imbibe more cross-language flexibility into the system.
Kafka is mainly used to produce apps that can process and re-process the data which is streamed on a disk. RabbitMQ was meant to stay within the shadows more and to promote communication and integration between the various applications of a single system. Both the systems are open source, although through different Public Licenses.
RabbitMQ has a larger number of client libraries, owing to the fact that it is more mature compared to Kafka. Both the systems have Ruby, Node.js, Java and Python in their arsenal, while RabbitMQ also has Clojure, C and Go too. Similarly, both the systems also support high availability.
A main differentiating factor is that Kafka does not support federated queues while processing, unlike RabbitMQ.
A Kafka vs RabbitMQ benchmark is difficult, so ensure that you choose what is best for your uses and clients! These are only a few of the differences – you should research more before making a final decision.