Difference between Kafka and ActiveMQ
I have been working on Active MQ for quite some time and familiar with the Active MQ architecture.
Recently I have been hearing a lot about Kafka as a messaging system.
What advantages does it have over Active MQ and other messaging system? Is it just another Big data buzz word?
Also is kafka suitable for zero loss messaging system?
Answer
This is too broad to discuss but in my opinion the most important factor about Kafka over ActiveMQ is the throughput. From the wiki page
Kafka provides an extremely high throughput distributed publish/subscribe messaging system. Additionally, it supports relatively long term persistence of messages to support a wide variety of consumers, partitioning of the message stream across servers and consumers, and functionality for loading data into Apache Hadoop for offline, batch processing.
Also is kafka suitable for zero loss messaging system?
In very brief kafka Guarantees these following :
1) Messages sent by a producer to a particular topic partition will be appended in the order they are sent.
2) For a topic with replication factor N, it will tolerate up to N-1 server failures without losing any messages committed to the log.