Kafka vs Riak

Overview

Riak

Stacks103

Followers137

Votes44

GitHub Stars4.0K

Forks535

Kafka

Stacks24.2K

Followers22.3K

Votes607

GitHub Stars31.2K

Forks14.8K

Kafka vs Riak: What are the differences?

Kafka: Distributed, fault tolerant, high throughput pub-sub messaging system. Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design; Riak: A distributed, decentralized data storage system. Riak is a distributed database designed to deliver maximum data availability by distributing data across multiple servers. As long as your client can reach one Riak server, it should be able to write data. In most failure scenarios, the data you want to read should be available, although it may not be the most up-to-date version of that data.

Kafka belongs to "Message Queue" category of the tech stack, while Riak can be primarily classified under "Databases".

"High-throughput" is the primary reason why developers consider Kafka over the competitors, whereas "High Performance " was stated as the key factor in picking Riak.

Kafka and Riak are both open source tools. It seems that Kafka with 12.5K GitHub stars and 6.7K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Riak with 3.22K GitHub stars and 526 GitHub forks.

Uber Technologies, Spotify, and Coursera are some of the popular companies that use Kafka, whereas Riak is used by SendGrid, Sentry, and OpenX. Kafka has a broader approval, being mentioned in 501 company stacks & 451 developers stacks; compared to Riak, which is listed in 15 company stacks and 10 developer stacks.

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Advice on Riak, Kafka

viradiya

Apr 12, 2020

Needs adviceon

AngularJS

ASP.NET Core

MSSQL

We are going to develop a microservices-based application. It consists of AngularJS, ASP.NET Core, and MSSQL.

We have 3 types of microservices. Emailservice, Filemanagementservice, Filevalidationservice

I am a beginner in microservices. But I have read about RabbitMQ, but come to know that there are Redis and Kafka also in the market. So, I want to know which is best.

933k views933k

Comments

Kirill

GO/C developer at Duckling Sales

Feb 16, 2021

Decided

Maybe not an obvious comparison with Kafka, since Kafka is pretty different from rabbitmq. But for small service, Rabbit as a pubsub platform is super easy to use and pretty powerful. Kafka as an alternative was the original choice, but its really a kind of overkill for a small-medium service. Especially if you are not planning to use k8s, since pure docker deployment can be a pain because of networking setup. Google PubSub was another alternative, its actually pretty cheap, but I never tested it since Rabbit was matching really good for mailing/notification services.

266k views266k

Comments

Ishfaq

Feb 28, 2020

Needs advice

Our backend application is sending some external messages to a third party application at the end of each backend (CRUD) API call (from UI) and these external messages take too much extra time (message building, processing, then sent to the third party and log success/failure), UI application has no concern to these extra third party messages.

So currently we are sending these third party messages by creating a new child thread at end of each REST API call so UI application doesn't wait for these extra third party API calls.

I want to integrate Apache Kafka for these extra third party API calls, so I can also retry on failover third party API calls in a queue(currently third party messages are sending from multiple threads at the same time which uses too much processing and resources) and logging, etc.

Question 1: Is this a use case of a message broker?

Question 2: If it is then Kafka vs RabitMQ which is the better?

804k views804k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Riak	Kafka
Riak is a distributed database designed to deliver maximum data availability by distributing data across multiple servers. As long as your client can reach one Riak server, it should be able to write data. In most failure scenarios, the data you want to read should be available, although it may not be the most up-to-date version of that data.	Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design.
-	Written at LinkedIn in Scala;Used by LinkedIn to offload processing of all page and other views;Defaults to using persistence, uses OS disk cache for hot data (has higher throughput then any of the above having persistence enabled);Supports both on-line as off-line processing
Statistics
GitHub Stars 4.0K	GitHub Stars 31.2K
GitHub Forks 535	GitHub Forks 14.8K
Stacks 103	Stacks 24.2K
Followers 137	Followers 22.3K
Votes 44	Votes 607
Pros & Cons
Pros 14 High Performance 11 High Availability 9 Easy Scalability 5 Flexible 1 Multi datacenter deployments	Pros 126 High-throughput 119 Distributed 92 Scalable 86 High-Performance 66 Durable Cons 32 Non-Java clients are second-class citizens 29 Needs Zookeeper 9 Operational difficulties 5 Terrible Packaging

What are some alternatives to Riak, Kafka?

MongoDB

MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents that can vary in structure, offering a dynamic, flexible schema. MongoDB was also designed for high availability and scalability, with built-in replication and auto-sharding.

MySQL

The MySQL software delivers a very fast, multi-threaded, multi-user, and robust SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. MySQL Server is intended for mission-critical, heavy-load production systems as well as for embedding into mass-deployed software.

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions.

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ gives your applications a common platform to send and receive messages, and your messages a safe place to live until received.

Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft® SQL Server is a database management and analysis system for e-commerce, line-of-business, and data warehousing solutions.

SQLite

SQLite is an embedded SQL database engine. Unlike most other SQL databases, SQLite does not have a separate server process. SQLite reads and writes directly to ordinary disk files. A complete SQL database with multiple tables, indices, triggers, and views, is contained in a single disk file.

Cassandra

Partitioning means that Cassandra can distribute your data across multiple machines in an application-transparent matter. Cassandra will automatically repartition as machines are added and removed from the cluster. Row store means that like relational databases, Cassandra organizes data by rows and columns. The Cassandra Query Language (CQL) is a close relative of SQL.

Memcached

Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.

MariaDB

Started by core members of the original MySQL team, MariaDB actively works with outside developers to deliver the most featureful, stable, and sanely licensed open SQL server in the industry. MariaDB is designed as a drop-in replacement of MySQL(R) with more features, new storage engines, fewer bugs, and better performance.

RethinkDB

RethinkDB is built to store JSON documents, and scale to multiple machines with very little effort. It has a pleasant query language that supports really useful queries like table joins and group by, and is easy to setup and learn.

Related Comparisons

"High-throughput" is the primary reason why developers consider Kafka over the competitors, whereas "High Performance " was stated as the key factor in picking Riak.

Kafka vs Riak