Hey,
It’s Sarvar Nadaf again, a senior developer at Luxoft. I worked on several technologies like CloudOps (Azure and AWS), DataOps, Serverless Analytics, and DevOps for various clients across the globe.
I hope you all are doing great. You must already be aware that this article is about Apache Kafka based on the title. Yes, you are correct. I am writing today’s article on Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka, also known as AWS MSK. Here, Amazon offers us Apache Kafka as a completely managed service, enabling big businesses to start utilizing the advantages of Apache Kafka in AWS as a fully managed service. I’ll give you an outline of what Apache Kafka is. If you want to understand more about Apache Kafka, I have two articles published on Medium that you should take a look at. I will provide you the Links to that article at the end of this article. After that, we’ll go into Amazon Managed Service Kafka in more detail. So let’s go deep into it.
What is Apache Kafka -
The open source, java-based Apache Kafka messaging system. It will enable us to obtain any type of data and keep it anywhere we choose. For its real-time streaming platform, Apache Kafka is well known. Apache Kafka collects information from a wide range of sources, such as social media, click streams, CCTV, sensor devices, and many more, and it provides that information in real time in any volume or size. It processes the data in real time and makes it available for real-time data operations like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data analytics.
What is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka -
We are now aware of what Apache Kafka is. Now we are looking at Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka, we can see how it differs from traditional Apache Kafka so lets see…….!
We can quickly gather real-time data, create and execute applications that use Apache Kafka to process streaming data with the help of the fully managed service known as Amazon Managed Service Kafka. Real-time streaming data pipelines and applications can be created using the open-source Apache Kafka framework. Native Apache Kafka APIs can be used with Amazon Managed Service Kafka to support machine learning and data analytics, analytics applications, data lakes, data streams, and more.
It is difficult to set up, scale, monitor and manage Apache Kafka clusters in a real time production environment. When we are running Apache Kafka independently in a production environment, we must set up monitoring and alarms, manually configure Apache Kafka, replace failing servers, orchestrate server patches and upgrades, design the cluster for high availability, ensure that data is securely and durably stored, also we need to insure the data and apache Kafka clusters security. We don’t need to be an expert in Apache Kafka infrastructure management to design and run production applications on Apache Kafka thanks to Amazon MSK.
We don’t need to administer the Apache Kafka cluster because it is fully managed. The provision of the servers, patching, upgrading and scaling will be handled by Amazon. We can set up highly available Apache Kafka clusters with settings and configuration with only a few clicks in the Amazon MSK dashboard. Using Amazon MSK, our Apache Kafka clusters are automatically created and maintained. Without causing any downtime for our application, Amazon MSK continuously checks the health of the cluster and removes unhealthy nodes automatically. Additionally, Amazon provides encrypting data at rest.
Advantages of AWS MSK -
Fully Managed -
fully managed as the name suggests A fully managed Apache Kafka cluster offered by AWS. For our AWS MSK cluster, we don’t need to manage any form of infrastructure here. We will be given the choice between using Serverless technology or the AWS best practices. Amazon MSK automatically provisions, configures, and manages our Apache Kafka cluster operations and Apache Zookeeper nodes once we’ve choose the configuration we want. We may stream data without worrying about cluster sizing or scaling since MSK Serverless manages partitions for Apache Kafka while also automatically provisioning and scaling resources. The pay as you go model of the Serverless option allows us to just pay for the resources we have provisioned. Remember that Serverless pricing is a little on the expensive side.
Fully Flexibility -
As we all know amazon mask is fully managed by amazon. We can quickly and easily integrate Apache Kafka with AWS Native Services. We may easily connect Amazon MSK to the AWS service, which increases its power and facilitates our ability to carry out a variety of operations for our applications. We may now easily migrate and run our current Apache Kafka applications on Amazon Web Services without having to make any changes to the application’s source code.
Highly Available -
As we explore the AWS MSK, fully managed. For the AWS MSK Cluster, AWS provides a highly available environment. By default, there are three availability zones over which all clusters are distributed. Amazon continuously monitors each node’s condition to ensure that there are no failures in the AWS MSK cluster. Without causing any downtime for our applications, Amazon MSK automatically replaces faulty components. We don’t need to start, stop, or directly access the Apache Zookeeper nodes because Amazon MSK manages their availability for us. Additionally, all of the data is replicated across all availability zones, guaranteeing that the data is also highly available.
Highly secure -
Amazon MSK provides multiple levels of security for our Apache Kafka clusters including VPC network isolation, Amazon IAM for control-plane API authorization, encryption at rest, and TLS encryption in transit.
AWS MSK Console -
The AWS MSK’s console can be seen here. We can install the Apache Kafka cluster with only a few clicks from this dashboard after logging into the console and searching for MSK in the search field.
Below are the two options that AWS MSK provides for setting up an Apache Kafka cluster. Stay tuned because I’ll go over all of these options in detail in upcoming articles.
Conclusion: I hope you have read all the way to the end of this article. We’ve seen what Apache Kafka is and how Amazon Web Services provides a fully managed Streaming Service for apache Kafka. We have seen an overview of the Amazon MSK and its detailed advantages over the traditional apache Kafka. We will examine deeper information about the Amazon MSK in following articles.
Links for Apache Kafka -
Here is a link to my articles on Apache Kafka, the first of which gives a basic overview and the second of which goes into more detail.
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Here is the End!
I hope you like my article. I’ll share my knowledge to you in an effort to make it simpler for you to understand a variety of technologies like this. I’ll be publishing more articles like this soon.
happy studying!