Amazon’s Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka service goes Serverless

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The blog highlights the benefits of Amazon MSK Serverless as the latest option for businesses using Apache Kafka to gather and analyze real-time data streams.

Today, real-time data streaming is critical to an organization’s success. Almost every industry is looking for ways to analyze and process voluminous real-time data and use the insights to solve business challenges. For instance, the manufacturing industry utilizes real-time data streaming to mitigate significant machine downtime or any other safety issues by notifying the concerned authorities or workers beforehand. Furthermore, real-time data streaming can help improve personalized customer experiences in the finance and healthcare industries. 

Organizations require a data stream processing platform like Apache Kafka to work with data in motion. Apache Kafka helps develop real-time streaming data analytics and can handle messages with minimal latency. It is highly reliable due to its capacity to manage massive amounts of data.

However, the platform poses several challenges when customers try to self-manage their Apache Kafka clusters. Organizations confront severe challenges such as upscaling and topic rebalancing as they need to manually balance clusters to prevent resource bottlenecks, which are expensive as well. Moreover, managing an increasing number of queues in a Kafka cluster can be difficult for Apache Kafka. It is difficult to achieve high availability using Apache Kafka, build complex data pipelines and manage the interaction between data producers and consumers.

Amazon’s Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) service helps address the above challenges. 

• Amazon MSK is a fully managed, highly available and secure service for Apache Kafka and Kafka Connect that makes it easy for you to build and run applications. 
• It offers multi-AZ replication and multiple levels of security, including VPC isolation, AWS IAM, encryption at rest and in transit, and TLS-based certificate authentication. 
• Amazon MSK supports SASL/SCRAM authentication with usernames and passwords secured by AWS Secrets Manager. 
• Amazon MSK integrates deeply with all AWS services such as Amazon Cloudwatch, IAM, KMS, VPC, Amazon CloudTrail, etc.
• Amazon MSK is the lowest cost managed to offer for Apache Kafka, typically 40-60% of the cost of running an equivalent workload on self-managed Kafka. 
• Finally, Amazon MSK provides easy lift and shift migrations. It makes it easier for organizations or businesses currently running Apache Kafa to migrate and run their existing Apache Kafka applications on AWS without changes to the application code.

Amazon MSK Serverless automatically manages Kafka cluster capacity

Amazon MSK Serverless is an enhanced version of Amazon MSK that allows you to run Apache Kafka without managing or scaling cluster capacity. MSK Serverless is the right choice for organizations embracing Apache Kafka to capture and analyze real-time data streams from IoT devices, website clickstreams, database logs, and other sources where dynamic data gets generated. MSK Serverless alleviates the concerns of capacity planning. 

Some of the significant advantages businesses can leverage through Amazon MSK Serverless are: 

• Fully managed and scalable to meet instant demands: Amazon MSK Serverless provisions, automatically manages and scales Apache Kafka and Kafka Connect clusters to provide on-demand streaming capacity and storage for even the most variable or unpredictable streaming workloads.

• Stream data effectively and quickly: The service includes the ability to effortlessly stream data and manage cluster capacity and Apache Kafka partitions leveraging Amazon MSK Serverless. Customers can create an Amazon MSK serverless cluster and stream data effortlessly. 

• Pay-as-you-go pricing: As with all AWS services, with throughput-based pricing, customers pay only for the capacity they need for their workload and need not worry about overprovisioning for peak capacity.

Amazon MSK is the ideal solution for organizations looking to implement Apache Kafka for real-time data streaming and analysis. Moreover, Amazon MSK serverless provides users with an enhanced version, simplifying the manual effort required. Reach out to Quantiphi’s AWS experts to improve business results and drive impact.

Written byRajas Walavalkar

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