What are the strengths and weaknesses of Kafka?
The advantages of Kafka:
- High performance: Kafka has very high throughput and low latency, supporting the processing of millions of messages per second.
- Scalability: Kafka can easily scale to handle large amounts of data and high concurrency requests.
- Reliability: Kafka utilizes a distributed architecture to provide a highly reliable messaging mechanism with data redundancy and fault tolerance mechanisms in place to ensure messages are not lost.
- Durability: Kafka persists messages to disk, ensuring they can be retained for a period of time even after being consumed, allowing consumers to replay the data.
- Multi-language support: Kafka supports various programming languages such as Java, Python, and C++, making it convenient for developers to use.
- Flexibility: Kafka can meet the needs of different application scenarios, supporting various message publishing and subscribing patterns such as point-to-point and publish-subscribe.
Kafka’s flaws:
- Complex configuration: Kafka’s configuration is relatively intricate, requiring a thorough understanding of the parameters’ meanings and impacts, which necessitates spending a certain amount of time and effort on configuration and optimization.
- Learning costs are high: As Kafka is a distributed system, it is relatively complex to use and requires a certain understanding of the principles of distributed systems and message queues, making it difficult for beginners to learn.
- Kafka does not directly support transactional operations, but it can be achieved through complex means.
- Kafka relies on ZooKeeper for managing metadata and coordinating tasks, which adds complexity to the system and creates a dependency on ZooKeeper.
- The real-time performance of the data is not high: Kafka is designed for high throughput and durability, so it may not be suitable for scenarios that require high real-time performance.
