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Azure IoT Hub vs Kafka: What are the differences?

Introduction

Azure IoT Hub and Kafka are both popular platforms for data streaming and processing. However, there are key differences between the two that make them suitable for different scenarios.

  1. Scalability: Azure IoT Hub is highly scalable and can handle millions of devices and messages, making it ideal for large-scale IoT applications. On the other hand, Kafka is designed for high-throughput data streaming and can handle large volumes of data from various sources, making it suitable for scenarios where scalability is a priority.

  2. Message persistence: Azure IoT Hub provides built-in message persistence, ensuring that messages are reliably delivered to devices even in the case of temporary network disruptions. Kafka, on the other hand, does not have built-in message persistence and relies on external storage systems for durability. This makes IoT Hub a better choice for applications that require guaranteed message delivery.

  3. Message transformation and routing: Azure IoT Hub provides a rich set of features for message transformation and routing, allowing users to filter, transform, and route messages based on different conditions and rules. Kafka, on the other hand, is primarily focused on data streaming and does not provide built-in capabilities for message transformation and routing. This makes IoT Hub more suitable for applications that require sophisticated message processing.

  4. Security and authentication: Azure IoT Hub offers robust security features, including device-to-cloud and cloud-to-device authentication. It also supports per-device access control and integration with Azure Active Directory for fine-grained access management. Kafka, on the other hand, provides basic security mechanisms such as SSL/TLS encryption but does not offer the same level of authentication and access control features as IoT Hub. This makes IoT Hub a better choice for applications that require strong security measures.

  5. Integration with other Azure services: Azure IoT Hub is tightly integrated with other Azure services, such as Azure Functions, Azure Stream Analytics, and Azure Machine Learning. This allows users to easily build end-to-end IoT solutions by leveraging the capabilities of these services. Kafka, on the other hand, is a standalone platform and requires additional integration efforts to work with other Azure services. This integration advantage makes IoT Hub a preferred choice for users already leveraging Azure services.

  6. Platform maturity and support: Azure IoT Hub is a fully managed service provided by Microsoft with extensive documentation, support, and community resources. It has been in the market for several years and is widely adopted. Kafka, on the other hand, is an open-source platform that is managed by the Apache Software Foundation. While Kafka has a strong community and ecosystem, it may not have the same level of commercial support and maturity as Azure IoT Hub.

Summary

In summary, Azure IoT Hub and Kafka have distinct differences in terms of scalability, message persistence, message transformation and routing, security and authentication, integration with other Azure services, and platform maturity and support. These differences make each platform more suitable for specific use cases and requirements.

Advice on Azure IoT Hub and Kafka
Needs advice
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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
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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 · 765.5K views
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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 · 514.3K views
Needs advice
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Apache ThriftApache ThriftKafkaKafka
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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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Naresh Kancharla
Staff Engineer at Nutanix · | 4 upvotes · 511.8K views
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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
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KafkaKafka
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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 · 716.1K views
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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 · 715.9K views
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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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Guillaume Maka
Full Stack Web Developer · | 2 upvotes · 715.1K views
Recommends
on
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

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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Recommends
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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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Needs advice
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KafkaKafkaRabbitMQRabbitMQ
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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 · 665.4K views
Recommends
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
on
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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Pros of Azure IoT Hub
Pros of Kafka
    Be the first to leave a pro
    • 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

    Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

    Cons of Azure IoT Hub
    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

      Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

      - No public GitHub repository available -

      What is Azure IoT Hub?

      Use device-to-cloud telemetry data to understand the state of your devices and define message routes to other Azure services without writing any code. In cloud-to-device messages, reliably send commands and notifications to your connected devices and track message delivery with acknowledgement receipts. Device messages are sent in a durable way to accommodate intermittently connected devices.

      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 companies use Azure IoT Hub?
      What companies use Kafka?
      See which teams inside your own company are using Azure IoT Hub or Kafka.
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      Blog Posts

      Dec 22 2021 at 5:41AM

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      What are some alternatives to Azure IoT Hub and Kafka?
      AWS Greengrass
      Greengrass lets you run IoT applications seamlessly across the AWS cloud and local devices using AWS Lambda and AWS IoT.
      Amazon IoT
      AWS IoT is a managed cloud platform that lets connected devices easily and securely interact with cloud applications and other devices. AWS IoT can support billions of devices and trillions of messages, and can process and route those messages to AWS endpoints and to other devices reliably and securely. With AWS IoT, your applications can keep track of and communicate with all your devices, all the time, even when they aren’t connected.
      Node-RED
      It is a programming tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services in new and interesting ways.
      AWS IoT Device Management
      AWS IoT Device Management makes it easy to securely onboard, organize, monitor, and remotely manage IoT devices at scale. IoT Device Management lets you register your devices individually or in bulk, and manage permissions so that devices remain secure. Then, you use the IoT Device Management console to organize your devices into groups, monitor and troubleshoot device functionality, and send remote updates to your devices.
      Google Cloud IoT Core
      Cloud IoT Core is a fully managed service that allows you to easily and securely connect, manage, and ingest data from millions of globally dispersed devices. Cloud IoT Core, in combination with other services on Google Cloud IoT platform, provides a complete solution for collecting, processing, analyzing, and visualizing IoT data in real time to support improved operational efficiency.
      See all alternatives