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  1. Stackups
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  4. Message Queue
  5. Amazon SQS vs Gearman vs Kafka

Amazon SQS vs Gearman vs Kafka

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon SQS
Amazon SQS
Stacks2.8K
Followers2.0K
Votes171
Kafka
Kafka
Stacks24.2K
Followers22.3K
Votes607
GitHub Stars31.2K
Forks14.8K
Gearman
Gearman
Stacks77
Followers144
Votes45

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Detailed Comparison

Amazon SQS
Amazon SQS
Kafka
Kafka
Gearman
Gearman

Transmit any volume of data, at any level of throughput, without losing messages or requiring other services to be always available. With SQS, you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available messaging cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use.

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

Gearman allows you to do work in parallel, to load balance processing, and to call functions between languages. It can be used in a variety of applications, from high-availability web sites to the transport of database replication events.

A queue can be created in any region.;The message payload can contain up to 256KB of text in any format. Each 64KB ‘chunk’ of payload is billed as 1 request. For example, a single API call with a 256KB payload will be billed as four requests.;Messages can be sent, received or deleted in batches of up to 10 messages or 256KB. Batches cost the same amount as single messages, meaning SQS can be even more cost effective for customers that use batching.;Long polling reduces extraneous polling to help you minimize cost while receiving new messages as quickly as possible. When your queue is empty, long-poll requests wait up to 20 seconds for the next message to arrive. Long poll requests cost the same amount as regular requests.;Messages can be retained in queues for up to 14 days.;Messages can be sent and read simultaneously.;Developers can get started with Amazon SQS by using only five APIs: CreateQueue, SendMessage, ReceiveMessage, ChangeMessageVisibility, and DeleteMessage. Additional APIs are available to provide advanced functionality.
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
Open Source It’s free! (in both meanings of the word) Gearman has an active open source community that is easy to get involved with if you need help or want to contribute. Worried about licensing? Gearman is BSD;Multi-language - There are interfaces for a number of languages, and this list is growing. You also have the option to write heterogeneous applications with clients submitting work in one language and workers performing that work in another;Flexible - You are not tied to any specific design pattern. You can quickly put together distributed applications using any model you choose, one of those options being Map/Reduce;Fast - Gearman has a simple protocol and interface with an optimized, and threaded, server written in C/C++ to minimize your application overhead;Embeddable - Since Gearman is fast and lightweight, it is great for applications of all sizes. It is also easy to introduce into existing applications with minimal overhead;No single point of failure - Gearman can not only help scale systems, but can do it in a fault tolerant way;No limits on message size - Gearman supports single messages up to 4gig in size. Need to do something bigger? No problem Gearman can chunk messages;Worried about scaling? - Don’t worry about it with Gearman. Craig’s List, Tumblr, Yelp, Etsy,… discover what others have known for years.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
31.2K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
14.8K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
2.8K
Stacks
24.2K
Stacks
77
Followers
2.0K
Followers
22.3K
Followers
144
Votes
171
Votes
607
Votes
45
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 62
    Easy to use, reliable
  • 40
    Low cost
  • 28
    Simple
  • 14
    Doesn't need to maintain it
  • 8
    It is Serverless
Cons
  • 2
    Difficult to configure
  • 2
    Proprietary
  • 2
    Has a max message size (currently 256K)
  • 1
    Has a maximum 15 minutes of delayed messages only
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
Pros
  • 11
    Free
  • 11
    Ease of use and very simple APIs
  • 6
    Polyglot
  • 5
    No single point of failure
  • 3
    Scalable

What are some alternatives to Amazon SQS, Kafka, Gearman?

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ

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

Celery

Celery

Celery is an asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing. It is focused on real-time operation, but supports scheduling as well.

NSQ

NSQ

NSQ is a realtime distributed messaging platform designed to operate at scale, handling billions of messages per day. It promotes distributed and decentralized topologies without single points of failure, enabling fault tolerance and high availability coupled with a reliable message delivery guarantee. See features & guarantees.

ActiveMQ

ActiveMQ

Apache ActiveMQ is fast, supports many Cross Language Clients and Protocols, comes with easy to use Enterprise Integration Patterns and many advanced features while fully supporting JMS 1.1 and J2EE 1.4. Apache ActiveMQ is released under the Apache 2.0 License.

ZeroMQ

ZeroMQ

The 0MQ lightweight messaging kernel is a library which extends the standard socket interfaces with features traditionally provided by specialised messaging middleware products. 0MQ sockets provide an abstraction of asynchronous message queues, multiple messaging patterns, message filtering (subscriptions), seamless access to multiple transport protocols and more.

Apache NiFi

Apache NiFi

An easy to use, powerful, and reliable system to process and distribute data. It supports powerful and scalable directed graphs of data routing, transformation, and system mediation logic.

Memphis

Memphis

Highly scalable and effortless data streaming platform. Made to enable developers and data teams to collaborate and build real-time and streaming apps fast.

IronMQ

IronMQ

An easy-to-use highly available message queuing service. Built for distributed cloud applications with critical messaging needs. Provides on-demand message queuing with advanced features and cloud-optimized performance.

Apache Pulsar

Apache Pulsar

Apache Pulsar is a distributed messaging solution developed and released to open source at Yahoo. Pulsar supports both pub-sub messaging and queuing in a platform designed for performance, scalability, and ease of development and operation.

Confluent

Confluent

It is a data streaming platform based on Apache Kafka: a full-scale streaming platform, capable of not only publish-and-subscribe, but also the storage and processing of data within the stream

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