Examining Apache Kafka Performance Metrics ft. Alok Nikhil

Coming up with an honest test built on open source tools in an easily documented, replicable environment for a distributed system like Apache Kafka® is not simple. Alok Nikhil (Cloud Native Engineer, Confluent) shares about getting Kafka in the cloud and how best to leverage Confluent Cloud for high performance and scalability. 

His blog post “Benchmarking Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar, and RabbitMQ: Which is the Fastest?” discusses how Confluent tested Kafka’s performance on the latest cloud hardware using research-based methods to answer this question. 

Alok and Tim talk through the vendor-neutral framework OpenMessaging Benchmark used for the tests, which is Pulsar’s standardized benchmarking framework for event streaming workloads. Alok and his co-author Vinoth Chandar helped improve that framework, evaluated messaging systems in the event streaming space like RabbitMQ, and talked about improvements to those existing platforms. 

Later in this episode, Alok shares what he believes would help move Kafka forward and what he predicts to come soon, like KIP-500, the removal of ZooKeeper dependency in Kafka. 

EPISODE LINKS

• Benchmarking Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar, and RabbitMQ: Which is the Fastest?
• Join the Confluent Community Slack
• Learn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent Developer
• Live demo: Kafka streaming in 10 minutes on Confluent Cloud
• Use 60PDCAST to get an additional $60 of free Confluent Cloud usage (details)

Episode source