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Amazon Redshift vs Kafka: What are the differences?

Introduction

Amazon Redshift and Kafka are both popular technologies used for data processing and data management. However, they have significant differences in terms of their purpose, functionality, and architecture.

  1. Data Storage and Processing: Amazon Redshift is a fully-managed data warehousing solution in the cloud, designed to handle large amounts of structured data for analytics purposes. It uses columnar storage for efficient data compression and query performance. On the other hand, Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that is optimized for high-throughput, fault-tolerant, and low-latency data streaming and processing. It is mainly used for real-time data integration and data pipeline scenarios.

  2. Data Ingestion: Redshift primarily allows batch ingestion of data through various methods like bulk loading, data import, and data integration with other AWS services. Kafka, on the other hand, provides a distributed, publish-subscribe messaging system where multiple producers can write data simultaneously to the Kafka cluster, allowing real-time streaming ingestion of data from multiple sources.

  3. Data Processing Paradigm: Redshift follows a traditional, SQL-based, batch-oriented approach for data processing and analytics. It is optimized for running complex analytical queries on massive volumes of data. Kafka, on the other hand, follows a stream processing paradigm, where data is processed and analyzed in real-time or near real-time as it flows through the Kafka cluster. It enables real-time data processing, transformations, and stream analytics on data streams.

  4. Data Persistence: In Amazon Redshift, data is stored persistently in the cluster, even if the cluster is shut down or restarted. The data is distributed across multiple nodes in a cluster and is replicated for fault tolerance. In Kafka, data is stored in a distributed commit log, which allows durable storage and enables fault tolerance. However, Kafka does not provide built-in persistence for an indefinite period, and the retention duration can be configured based on the required period.

  5. Data Durability and Fault Tolerance: Redshift ensures data durability and fault tolerance through the replication of data across multiple nodes within a cluster. It automatically takes care of data backups and replication to handle system failures. Kafka, on the other hand, ensures fault tolerance and data durability through the concept of replication and data replication across multiple Kafka brokers. It provides high availability and fault tolerance by distributing and replicating data across the Kafka cluster.

  6. Data Latency: Amazon Redshift is optimized for OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) workloads, where the focus is on running complex analytical queries on large volumes of data. It provides high-performance query execution and supports highly concurrent workloads. Kafka, on the other hand, is optimized for low-latency data processing and enables near real-time streaming processing of data. It supports fast data ingestion and processing of high-volume data streams with low latency.

In summary, Amazon Redshift is a data warehousing solution designed for storing and analyzing large volumes of structured data, while Kafka is a distributed streaming platform optimized for real-time data streaming, processing, and integration. Redshift follows a traditional batch-oriented SQL-based approach for data processing, whereas Kafka follows a real-time stream processing paradigm. Redshift provides persistent storage and is optimized for complex analytical queries, while Kafka enables low-latency, fault-tolerant data streaming and processing.

Advice on Amazon Redshift and Kafka

We need to perform ETL from several databases into a data warehouse or data lake. We want to

  • keep raw and transformed data available to users to draft their own queries efficiently
  • give users the ability to give custom permissions and SSO
  • move between open-source on-premises development and cloud-based production environments

We want to use inexpensive Amazon EC2 instances only on medium-sized data set 16GB to 32GB feeding into Tableau Server or PowerBI for reporting and data analysis purposes.

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Replies (3)
John Nguyen
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on
AirflowAirflowAWS LambdaAWS Lambda

You could also use AWS Lambda and use Cloudwatch event schedule if you know when the function should be triggered. The benefit is that you could use any language and use the respective database client.

But if you orchestrate ETLs then it makes sense to use Apache Airflow. This requires Python knowledge.

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Recommends
on
AirflowAirflow

Though we have always built something custom, Apache airflow (https://airflow.apache.org/) stood out as a key contender/alternative when it comes to open sources. On the commercial offering, Amazon Redshift combined with Amazon Kinesis (for complex manipulations) is great for BI, though Redshift as such is expensive.

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Recommends

You may want to look into a Data Virtualization product called Conduit. It connects to disparate data sources in AWS, on prem, Azure, GCP, and exposes them as a single unified Spark SQL view to PowerBI (direct query) or Tableau. Allows auto query and caching policies to enhance query speeds and experience. Has a GPU query engine and optimized Spark for fallback. Can be deployed on your AWS VM or on prem, scales up and out. Sounds like the ideal solution to your needs.

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Needs advice
on
KafkaKafkaRabbitMQRabbitMQ
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RedisRedis

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.

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Replies (4)
Maheedhar Aluri
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on
KafkaKafka

Kafka is an Enterprise Messaging Framework whereas Redis is an Enterprise Cache Broker, in-memory database and high performance database.Both are having their own advantages, but they are different in usage and implementation. Now if you are creating microservices check the user consumption volumes, its generating logs, scalability, systems to be integrated and so on. I feel for your scenario initially you can go with KAFKA bu as the throughput, consumption and other factors are scaling then gradually you can add Redis accordingly.

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Recommends
on
AngularAngular

I first recommend that you choose Angular over AngularJS if you are starting something new. AngularJs is no longer getting enhancements, but perhaps you meant Angular. Regarding microservices, I recommend considering microservices when you have different development teams for each service that may want to use different programming languages and backend data stores. If it is all the same team, same code language, and same data store I would not use microservices. I might use a message queue, in which case RabbitMQ is a good one. But you may also be able to simply write your own in which you write a record in a table in MSSQL and one of your services reads the record from the table and processes it. The most challenging part of doing it yourself is writing a service that does a good job of reading the queue without reading the same message multiple times or missing a message; and that is where RabbitMQ can help.

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Recommends
on
NATSNATS

We found that the CNCF landscape is a good advisor when working going into the cloud / microservices space: https://landscape.cncf.io/fullscreen=yes. When choosing a technology one important criteria to me is if it is cloud native or not. Neither Redis, RabbitMQ nor Kafka is cloud native. The try to adapt but will be replaced eventually with technologies that are cloud native.

We have gone with NATS and have never looked back. We haven't spend a single minute on server maintainance in the last year and the setup of a cluster is way too easy. With the new features NATS incorporates now (and the ones still on the roadmap) it is already and will be sooo much mure than Redis, RabbitMQ and Kafka are. It can replace service discovery, load balancing, global multiclusters and failover, etc, etc.

Your thought might be: But I don't need all of that! Well, at the same time it is much more leightweight than Redis, RabbitMQ and especially Kafka.

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Amit Mor
Software Architect at Payoneer · | 3 upvotes · 833.8K views
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KafkaKafka

I think something is missing here and you should consider answering it to yourself. You are building a couple of services. Why are you considering event-sourcing architecture using Message Brokers such as the above? Won't a simple REST service based arch suffice? Read about CQRS and the problems it entails (state vs command impedance for example). Do you need Pub/Sub or Push/Pull? Is queuing of messages enough or would you need querying or filtering of messages before consumption? Also, someone would have to manage these brokers (unless using managed, cloud provider based solution), automate their deployment, someone would need to take care of backups, clustering if needed, disaster recovery, etc. I have a good past experience in terms of manageability/devops of the above options with Kafka and Redis, not so much with RabbitMQ. Both are very performant. But also note that Redis is not a pure message broker (at time of writing) but more of a general purpose in-memory key-value store. Kafka nowadays is much more than a distributed message broker. Long story short. In my taste, you should go with a minialistic approach and try to avoid either of them if you can, especially if your architecture does not fall nicely into event sourcing. If not I'd examine Kafka. If you need more capabilities than I'd consider Redis and use it for all sorts of other things such as a cache.

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Pramod Nikam
Co Founder at Usability Designs · | 2 upvotes · 560.1K views
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and
NSQNSQ

I am looking into IoT World Solution where we have MQTT Broker. This MQTT Broker Sits in one of the Data Center. We are doing a lot of Alert and Alarm related processing on that Data, Currently, we are looking into Solution which can do distributed persistence of log/alert primarily on remote Disk.

Our primary need is to use lightweight where operational complexity and maintenance costs can be significantly reduced. We want to do it on-premise so we are not considering cloud solutions.

We looked into the following alternatives:

Apache Kafka - Great choice but operation and maintenance wise very complex. Rabbit MQ - High availability is the issue, Apache Pulsar - Operational Complexity. NATS - Absence of persistence. Akka Streams - Big learning curve and operational streams.

So we are looking into a lightweight library that can do distributed persistence preferably with publisher and subscriber model. Preferable on JVM stack.

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Replies (1)
Naresh Kancharla
Staff Engineer at Nutanix · | 4 upvotes · 557.5K views
Recommends
on
KafkaKafka

Kafka is best fit here. Below are the advantages with Kafka ACLs (Security), Schema (protobuf), Scale, Consumer driven and No single point of failure.

Operational complexity is manageable with open source monitoring tools.

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Needs advice
on
KafkaKafka
and
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

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?

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Replies (4)
Tarun Batra
Senior Software Developer at Okta · | 7 upvotes · 783.3K views
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on
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

RabbitMQ is great for queuing and retrying. You can send the requests to your backend which will further queue these requests in RabbitMQ (or Kafka, too). The consumer on the other end can take care of processing . For a detailed analysis, check this blog about choosing between Kafka and RabbitMQ.

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Trevor Rydalch
Software Engineer at InsideSales.com · | 6 upvotes · 783.1K views
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on
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

Well, first off, it's good practice to do as little non-UI work on the foreground thread as possible, regardless of whether the requests take a long time. You don't want the UI thread blocked.

This sounds like a good use case for RabbitMQ. Primarily because you don't need each message processed by more than one consumer. If you wanted to process a single message more than once (say for different purposes), then Apache Kafka would be a much better fit as you can have multiple consumer groups consuming from the same topics independently.

Have your API publish messages containing the data necessary for the third-party request to a Rabbit queue and have consumers reading off there. If it fails, you can either retry immediately, or publish to a deadletter queue where you can reprocess them whenever you want (shovel them back into the regular queue).

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Recommends
on
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

In my opinion RabbitMQ fits better in your case because you don’t have order in queue. You can process your messages in any order. You don’t need to store the data what you sent. Kafka is a persistent storage like the blockchain. RabbitMQ is a message broker. Kafka is not a good solution for the system with confirmations of the messages delivery.

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Guillaume Maka
Full Stack Web Developer · | 2 upvotes · 782.4K views
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on
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As far as I understand, Kafka is a like a persisted event state manager where you can plugin various source of data and transform/query them as event via a stream API. Regarding your use case I will consider using RabbitMQ if your intent is to implement service inter-communication kind of thing. RabbitMQ is a good choice for one-one publisher/subscriber (or consumer) and I think you can also have multiple consumers by configuring a fanout exchange. RabbitMQ provide also message retries, message cancellation, durable queue, message requeue, message ACK....

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Needs advice
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RedisRedis

Hello! [Client sends live video frames -> Server computes and responds the result] Web clients send video frames from their webcam then on the back we need to run them through some algorithm and send the result back as a response. Since everything will need to work in a live mode, we want something fast and also suitable for our case (as everyone needs). Currently, we are considering RabbitMQ for the purpose, but recently I have noticed that there is Redis and Kafka too. Could you please help us choose among them or anything more suitable beyond these guys. I think something similar to our product would be people using their webcam to get Snapchat masks on their faces, and the calculated face points are responded on from the server, then the client-side draw the mask on the user's face. I hope this helps. Thank you!

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Replies (3)
Jordi Martínez
Senior software architect at Bootloader · | 3 upvotes · 732.4K views
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on
KafkaKafka

For your use case, the tool that fits more is definitely Kafka. RabbitMQ was not invented to handle data streams, but messages. Plenty of them, of course, but individual messages. Redis is an in-memory database, which is what makes it so fast. Redis recently included features to handle data stream, but it cannot best Kafka on this, or at least not yet. Kafka is not also super fast, it also provides lots of features to help create software to handle those streams.

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Recommends
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RabbitMQRabbitMQ

I've used all of them and Kafka is hard to set up and maintain. Mostly is a Java dinosaur that you can set up and. I've used it with Storm but that is another big dinosaur. Redis is mostly for caching. The queue mechanism is not very scalable for multiple processors. Depending on the speed you need to implement on the reliability I would use RabbitMQ. You can store the frames(if they are too big) somewhere else and just have a link to them. Moving data through any of these will increase cost of transportation. With Rabbit, you can always have multiple consumers and check for redundancy. Hope it clears out your thoughts!

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Recommends
on
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

For this kind of use case I would recommend either RabbitMQ or Kafka depending on the needs for scaling, redundancy and how you want to design it.

Kafka's true value comes into play when you need to distribute the streaming load over lot's of resources. If you were passing the video frames directly into the queue then you'd probably want to go with Kafka however if you can just pass a pointer to the frames then RabbitMQ should be fine and will be much simpler to run.

Bear in mind too that Kafka is a persistent log, not just a message bus so any data you feed into it is kept available until it expires (which is configurable). This can be useful if you have multiple clients reading from the queue with their own lifecycle but in your case it doesn't sound like that would be necessary. You could also use a RabbitMQ fanout exchange if you need that in the future.

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Decisions about Amazon Redshift and Kafka
Julien Lafont

Cloud Data-warehouse is the centerpiece of modern Data platform. The choice of the most suitable solution is therefore fundamental.

Our benchmark was conducted over BigQuery and Snowflake. These solutions seem to match our goals but they have very different approaches.

BigQuery is notably the only 100% serverless cloud data-warehouse, which requires absolutely NO maintenance: no re-clustering, no compression, no index optimization, no storage management, no performance management. Snowflake requires to set up (paid) reclustering processes, to manage the performance allocated to each profile, etc. We can also mention Redshift, which we have eliminated because this technology requires even more ops operation.

BigQuery can therefore be set up with almost zero cost of human resources. Its on-demand pricing is particularly adapted to small workloads. 0 cost when the solution is not used, only pay for the query you're running. But quickly the use of slots (with monthly or per-minute commitment) will drastically reduce the cost of use. We've reduced by 10 the cost of our nightly batches by using flex slots.

Finally, a major advantage of BigQuery is its almost perfect integration with Google Cloud Platform services: Cloud functions, Dataflow, Data Studio, etc.

BigQuery is still evolving very quickly. The next milestone, BigQuery Omni, will allow to run queries over data stored in an external Cloud platform (Amazon S3 for example). It will be a major breakthrough in the history of cloud data-warehouses. Omni will compensate a weakness of BigQuery: transferring data in near real time from S3 to BQ is not easy today. It was even simpler to implement via Snowflake's Snowpipe solution.

We also plan to use the Machine Learning features built into BigQuery to accelerate our deployment of Data-Science-based projects. An opportunity only offered by the BigQuery solution

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Pros of Amazon Redshift
Pros of Kafka
  • 41
    Data Warehousing
  • 27
    Scalable
  • 17
    SQL
  • 14
    Backed by Amazon
  • 5
    Encryption
  • 1
    Cheap and reliable
  • 1
    Isolation
  • 1
    Best Cloud DW Performance
  • 1
    Fast columnar storage
  • 126
    High-throughput
  • 119
    Distributed
  • 92
    Scalable
  • 86
    High-Performance
  • 66
    Durable
  • 38
    Publish-Subscribe
  • 19
    Simple-to-use
  • 18
    Open source
  • 12
    Written in Scala and java. Runs on JVM
  • 9
    Message broker + Streaming system
  • 4
    KSQL
  • 4
    Avro schema integration
  • 4
    Robust
  • 3
    Suport Multiple clients
  • 2
    Extremely good parallelism constructs
  • 2
    Partioned, replayable log
  • 1
    Simple publisher / multi-subscriber model
  • 1
    Fun
  • 1
    Flexible

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Cons of Amazon Redshift
Cons of Kafka
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 32
      Non-Java clients are second-class citizens
    • 29
      Needs Zookeeper
    • 9
      Operational difficulties
    • 5
      Terrible Packaging

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    What is Amazon Redshift?

    It is optimized for data sets ranging from a few hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and costs less than $1,000 per terabyte per year, a tenth the cost of most traditional data warehousing solutions.

    What is Kafka?

    Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design.

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    What are some alternatives to Amazon Redshift and Kafka?
    Google BigQuery
    Run super-fast, SQL-like queries against terabytes of data in seconds, using the processing power of Google's infrastructure. Load data with ease. Bulk load your data using Google Cloud Storage or stream it in. Easy access. Access BigQuery by using a browser tool, a command-line tool, or by making calls to the BigQuery REST API with client libraries such as Java, PHP or Python.
    Amazon Athena
    Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.
    Amazon DynamoDB
    With it , you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available distributed database cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use.
    Amazon Redshift Spectrum
    With Redshift Spectrum, you can extend the analytic power of Amazon Redshift beyond data stored on local disks in your data warehouse to query vast amounts of unstructured data in your Amazon S3 “data lake” -- without having to load or transform any data.
    Hadoop
    The Apache Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using simple programming models. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage.
    See all alternatives