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

Apache Camel

1.6K
318
+ 1
22
Kafka

23.6K
22K
+ 1
607
Add tool

Apache Camel vs Kafka: What are the differences?

Introduction

Apache Camel and Kafka are two popular open-source tools used in the integration and messaging domain. While both of them serve similar purposes, there are key differences that set them apart in terms of their functionality and use cases.

  1. Scalability and Persistence: Apache Camel is a lightweight integration framework that focuses on the routing and processing of messages between systems. It does not inherently provide scalability or persistence capabilities out of the box. On the other hand, Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that is designed for handling high-throughput, fault-tolerant, and scalable data streams. Kafka provides built-in persistence and allows data to be stored in a fault-tolerant manner.

  2. Message Model: Apache Camel follows an integration patterns-based message model, where messages are delivered from an input endpoint to an output endpoint through a series of intermediary processors. It supports various message exchange patterns like request-reply, publish-subscribe, and others. Kafka, on the other hand, uses a publish-subscribe messaging model by default, where messages are produced to topics and consumers subscribe to these topics for processing.

  3. Flexibility and Complex Routing: Apache Camel provides a rich set of enterprise integration patterns and a domain-specific language (DSL) for designing and implementing complex routing and mediation logic. It allows developers to build custom integration flows with various transformation and routing capabilities. Kafka, on the other hand, focuses more on high-performance and fault-tolerant stream processing. It provides basic stream processing operations like filtering, transforming, and aggregating data, but it may not have the same level of flexibility and advanced routing capabilities as Apache Camel.

  4. Workflow Orchestration: Apache Camel has built-in support for workflow orchestration using the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard. It allows developers to define and execute complex workflows involving multiple services and systems. Kafka, on the other hand, is primarily designed for event-driven architectures and real-time stream processing. It does not provide direct support for workflow orchestration.

  5. Message Storage: Apache Camel does not have built-in capabilities for message storage. It focuses on the movement and processing of messages between systems without persisting them. Kafka, on the other hand, provides durable message storage by keeping messages in a distributed log. It allows messages to be stored for a configurable retention period and supports fault-tolerant message replay.

  6. Ecosystem and Integration: Apache Camel has a vast ecosystem with a wide range of connectors and components available for integrating with various systems and technologies. It supports integration with databases, messaging providers, cloud services, and more. Kafka, on the other hand, has a growing ecosystem around it and provides native integrations with popular Big Data and stream processing technologies like Apache Spark, Apache Storm, and Apache Flink.

Summary

In summary, Apache Camel is a lightweight integration framework with advanced routing capabilities and support for workflow orchestration. Kafka is a distributed streaming platform focused on high-throughput, fault-tolerant, and scalable data streams with built-in message persistence and stream processing capabilities.

Advice on Apache Camel and Kafka
Needs advice
on
KafkaKafkaRabbitMQRabbitMQ
and
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.

See more
Replies (4)
Maheedhar Aluri
Recommends
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.

See more
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.

See more
Amit Mor
Software Architect at Payoneer · | 3 upvotes · 819.1K views
Recommends
on
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.

See more
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.

See more
Pramod Nikam
Co Founder at Usability Designs · | 2 upvotes · 550K views
Needs advice
on
Apache ThriftApache ThriftKafkaKafka
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.

See more
Replies (1)
Naresh Kancharla
Staff Engineer at Nutanix · | 4 upvotes · 547.4K 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.

See more
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?

See more
Replies (4)
Tarun Batra
Senior Software Developer at Okta · | 7 upvotes · 768.8K views
Recommends
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.

See more
Trevor Rydalch
Software Engineer at InsideSales.com · | 6 upvotes · 768.6K views
Recommends
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).

See more
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.

See more
Guillaume Maka
Full Stack Web Developer · | 2 upvotes · 767.9K 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....

See more
Needs advice
on
KafkaKafkaRabbitMQRabbitMQ
and
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!

See more
Replies (3)
Jordi Martínez
Senior software architect at Bootloader · | 3 upvotes · 717.9K 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.

See more
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!

See more
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.

See more
Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
Learn More
Pros of Apache Camel
Pros of Kafka
  • 5
    Based on Enterprise Integration Patterns
  • 4
    Has over 250 components
  • 4
    Free (open source)
  • 4
    Highly configurable
  • 3
    Open Source
  • 2
    Has great community
  • 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 Apache Camel
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

    What is Apache Camel?

    An open source Java framework that focuses on making integration easier and more accessible to developers.

    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.

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

    What companies use Apache Camel?
    What companies use Kafka?
    Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
    Learn More

    Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

    What tools integrate with Apache Camel?
    What tools integrate with Kafka?

    Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

    Blog Posts

    Dec 22 2021 at 5:41AM

    Pinterest

    MySQLKafkaDruid+3
    3
    608
    Amazon S3KafkaZookeeper+5
    8
    1636
    Mar 24 2021 at 12:57PM

    Pinterest

    GitJenkinsKafka+7
    3
    2211
    What are some alternatives to Apache Camel and Kafka?
    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.
    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.
    Spring Batch
    It is designed to enable the development of robust batch applications vital for the daily operations of enterprise systems. It also provides reusable functions that are essential in processing large volumes of records, including logging/tracing, transaction management, job processing statistics, job restart, skip, and resource management.
    RabbitMQ
    RabbitMQ gives your applications a common platform to send and receive messages, and your messages a safe place to live until received.
    Talend
    It is an open source software integration platform helps you in effortlessly turning data into business insights. It uses native code generation that lets you run your data pipelines seamlessly across all cloud providers and get optimized performance on all platforms.
    See all alternatives