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Kafka Streams vs Apache Spark: What are the differences?

What is Kafka Streams? A client library for building applications and microservices. It is a client library for building applications and microservices, where the input and output data are stored in Kafka clusters. It combines the simplicity of writing and deploying standard Java and Scala applications on the client side with the benefits of Kafka's server-side cluster technology.

What is Apache Spark? Fast and general engine for large-scale data processing. Spark is a fast and general processing engine compatible with Hadoop data. It can run in Hadoop clusters through YARN or Spark's standalone mode, and it can process data in HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, Hive, and any Hadoop InputFormat. It is designed to perform both batch processing (similar to MapReduce) and new workloads like streaming, interactive queries, and machine learning.

Kafka Streams can be classified as a tool in the "Stream Processing" category, while Apache Spark is grouped under "Big Data Tools".

Apache Spark is an open source tool with 22.9K GitHub stars and 19.7K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Apache Spark's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Apache Spark has a broader approval, being mentioned in 356 company stacks & 564 developers stacks; compared to Kafka Streams, which is listed in 7 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.

Advice on Kafka Streams and Apache Spark
Nilesh Akhade
Technical Architect at Self Employed · | 5 upvotes · 553.3K views

We have a Kafka topic having events of type A and type B. We need to perform an inner join on both type of events using some common field (primary-key). The joined events to be inserted in Elasticsearch.

In usual cases, type A and type B events (with same key) observed to be close upto 15 minutes. But in some cases they may be far from each other, lets say 6 hours. Sometimes event of either of the types never come.

In all cases, we should be able to find joined events instantly after they are joined and not-joined events within 15 minutes.

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ElasticsearchElasticsearch

The first solution that came to me is to use upsert to update ElasticSearch:

  1. Use the primary-key as ES document id
  2. Upsert the records to ES as soon as you receive them. As you are using upsert, the 2nd record of the same primary-key will not overwrite the 1st one, but will be merged with it.

Cons: The load on ES will be higher, due to upsert.

To use Flink:

  1. Create a KeyedDataStream by the primary-key
  2. In the ProcessFunction, save the first record in a State. At the same time, create a Timer for 15 minutes in the future
  3. When the 2nd record comes, read the 1st record from the State, merge those two, and send out the result, and clear the State and the Timer if it has not fired
  4. When the Timer fires, read the 1st record from the State and send out as the output record.
  5. Have a 2nd Timer of 6 hours (or more) if you are not using Windowing to clean up the State

Pro: if you have already having Flink ingesting this stream. Otherwise, I would just go with the 1st solution.

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Akshaya Rawat
Senior Specialist Platform at Publicis Sapient · | 3 upvotes · 390.7K views
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Apache SparkApache Spark

Please refer "Structured Streaming" feature of Spark. Refer "Stream - Stream Join" at https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/structured-streaming-programming-guide.html#stream-stream-joins . In short you need to specify "Define watermark delays on both inputs" and "Define a constraint on time across the two inputs"

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Pros of Kafka Streams
Pros of Apache Spark
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    • 61
      Open-source
    • 48
      Fast and Flexible
    • 8
      One platform for every big data problem
    • 8
      Great for distributed SQL like applications
    • 6
      Easy to install and to use
    • 3
      Works well for most Datascience usecases
    • 2
      Interactive Query
    • 2
      Machine learning libratimery, Streaming in real
    • 2
      In memory Computation

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    Cons of Kafka Streams
    Cons of Apache Spark
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      • 4
        Speed

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      What is Kafka Streams?

      It is a client library for building applications and microservices, where the input and output data are stored in Kafka clusters. It combines the simplicity of writing and deploying standard Java and Scala applications on the client side with the benefits of Kafka's server-side cluster technology.

      What is Apache Spark?

      Spark is a fast and general processing engine compatible with Hadoop data. It can run in Hadoop clusters through YARN or Spark's standalone mode, and it can process data in HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, Hive, and any Hadoop InputFormat. It is designed to perform both batch processing (similar to MapReduce) and new workloads like streaming, interactive queries, and machine learning.

      Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

      What companies use Kafka Streams?
      What companies use Apache Spark?
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      What tools integrate with Kafka Streams?
      What tools integrate with Apache Spark?

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      What are some alternatives to Kafka Streams and Apache Spark?
      Kafka
      Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design.
      Apache Flink
      Apache Flink is an open source system for fast and versatile data analytics in clusters. Flink supports batch and streaming analytics, in one system. Analytical programs can be written in concise and elegant APIs in Java and Scala.
      Apache Beam
      It implements batch and streaming data processing jobs that run on any execution engine. It executes pipelines on multiple execution environments.
      Apache Storm
      Apache Storm is a free and open source distributed realtime computation system. Storm makes it easy to reliably process unbounded streams of data, doing for realtime processing what Hadoop did for batch processing. Storm has many use cases: realtime analytics, online machine learning, continuous computation, distributed RPC, ETL, and more. Storm is fast: a benchmark clocked it at over a million tuples processed per second per node. It is scalable, fault-tolerant, guarantees your data will be processed, and is easy to set up and operate.
      KSQL
      KSQL is an open source streaming SQL engine for Apache Kafka. It provides a simple and completely interactive SQL interface for stream processing on Kafka; no need to write code in a programming language such as Java or Python. KSQL is open-source (Apache 2.0 licensed), distributed, scalable, reliable, and real-time.
      See all alternatives