confluent-kafka is an open source tool with 2K GitHub stars and 547 GitHub forks. We think this is a positive change and one that can help ensure small open source communities aren’t acting as free and unsustainable R&D for tech giants that put sustaining resources only into their own differentiated proprietary offerings.”. This allows to build and deploy independent, mission-critical streaming real time application and microservices. Perhaps that’s stating it too bluntly. Now, back onto Confluent vs AWS. How viable is this model? The usage calculated based on the data stored on the Confluent Cloud. Confluent Enterprise is a distribution of Apache Kafka for production environments. The new tier provides up to $50 of service a month for up to three months. Here’s how Jesse Anderson, managing director of the Big Data Institute put it. It’s not something new, the Confluent Replicator was also another proprietary piece of software meant to replace the shaky OSS “Mirror Maker”. I think Confluent building enterprise features in-house is a great model that will for sure seduce large corporations. Confluent’s employees, on the other hand, created most of it, while working on the company’s payroll. And here comes the fine game to play. As such, corporations behind open source projects offer OSS as a service (MongoDB Inc., Elastic, etc…). This session discusses how teams in different industries solve these challenges by building a native event streaming platform from the ground up instead of using ETL and ESB tools in their architecture. The aforementioned were all available via the open source Apache 2.0 license before the change was announced. • decoupling of microservices! Why the change? What’s the difference? Confluent Platform—based on open source Apache Kafka but with proprietary extensions. It’s also apparent they enable Confluent to differentiate further their enterprise offering by offering proprietary features that probably won’t be rolled back into the OSS project. Schema Registry and REST proxy also supported. Founded by the original developers of Apache Kafka, Confluent delivers the most complete distribution of Kafka with Confluent Platform. Confluent's software for working with open-source data tool Apache Kafka is now valued at $2.5 billion just three years after hiring its first sales rep. If any corrections need to be made please let me know in the comments or on twitter @stephanemaarek. (Three other commercial software vendors who offer enterprise-grade services around open source projects have made changes this year.). Overview¶. While this won’t affect most companies, if you’re using the Confluent “source-available” products, this leaves you with “do-it-yourself anywhere” or Confluent Cloud as only options for migrations, which is in some ways a form of light lock-in. While Apache Kafka is free to use and setup, when set up within a corporation, it costs a lot to maintain as you usually need full-time employees to harden and monitor the infrastructure. This has been a topic of focus in the press recently. This is the goal of the KIP. Some companies really focus on their contributions or how they have the founders of a project working at the company.”. apache kafka, tutorial, linux, windows, event streaming, open source, kafka, confluent, wsl 2, application Published at DZone with permission of Jim Galasyn . Confluent.Kafka is a tool in the NuGet Packages category of a tech stack. As a customer of AWS though, you are free to deploy your own schema registry or KSQL set up on top of Amazon MSK, because you would own and manage the deployment of those. Apache Kafka is an open source streaming platform that allows you to build a scalable, distributed infrastructure that integrates legacy and modern applications in a flexible, decoupled way. 2 Apache Kafka vs. Business Model 1: Sell support licenses for the open-source software. As a company, one solution we could pursue would be for us to build more proprietary software and pull back from our open source investments. It’s used by companies like Linkedin, Uber, Twitter and more than one-third of all Fortune 500 companies use Apache Kafka. Do too much of OSS and competitors can make the business models described above work. Apache Kafka has been open-source for over 8 years and will remain open-source forever. Do too much of in-house and the OSS community feels left out. 3 Agenda 1.Traditional Middleware 2.Event Streaming Platform 3.Enemies 4.Friends 5.Frenemies Apache Kafka is an open-source Stream Processing Platform . AWS has a good track record of piggy-backing on OSS projects and selling them on their platform, usually being integrated with their VPC offering and possibly with IAM for security. Traditional Middleware Agreement: Kafka is the de facto standard for … • messaging at scale! Confluent Cloud is Confluent’s attempt at this and according to the statements made during the Kafka Summit of London 2019, business is going well. In this “all in one package”, you get the software, an “elastic” consumption model, and usually some sort of tiered support based on your needs. Tiered Storage is not available yet for open source Apache Kafka, but Confluent is working with the rest of the Kafka community (including some major tech companies like … It is a thin wrapper around librdkafka, a Kafka library written in C that forms the basis for the Confluent Kafka libraries for Go and .NET. It is a message broker/publish-subscribe system in its core . Confluent consists of three main modules designed for different purposes: Confluent Open Source, Confluent Cloud and Confluent Enterprise. AWS announced MSK as their own Kafka as Service offering a year back. As a private corporation that is VC-backed, what do you choose to commit to the OSS project versus do in-house? Still, one should be aware that more than 75% of the contributions to Apache Kafka is made by Confluent employees, and as such, I hope they’ll keep their impartiality in the future years. See the original article here. As a reaction to this, Confluent made some of their satellite open-source projects “source-available” to protect their IP and prevent AWS from using those directly (although that wouldn’t prevent AWS from re-implementing those with a compatible API, like mentioned). Here’s my analysis on the strategy I think Confluent is following, and some recent developments. The community and corporations backing these projects usually call for outrage as AWS has not had a good track record at contributing back to these projects. Some of these companies partner with the open source companies that offer hosted versions of their system as a service. As workloads move to the cloud we need a mechanism for preserving that freedom while also enabling a cycle of investment, and this is our motivation for the licensing change. Last week Confluent added a new license to the mix it uses to cover its open source data streaming products. Building a business around OSS is not easy and something companies struggle to do. Kafka can connect to external systems (for data import/export) via Kafka Connect and provides Kafka Streams, a Java stream processing library. This would include letting other companies make KIP for features that compete directly with what Confluent is offering in-house, including global Kafka. As might be expected, Confluent’s decision drew criticism. Confluent. This is why if you need Kafka-as-a-Service, we have Aiven, CloudKarafka, Instaclustr, Confluent, and other players. Apache Kafka is an open-source stream-processing software platform developed by the Apache Software Foundation, written in Scala and Java.The project aims to provide a unified, high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds. Now it’s clear Confluent is at least on(c)e step ahead. It simplifies operations and administration of Kafka clusters, with administration, monitoring and management tools. This new kind of license is specific to Confluent as far as I know, although most of the other companies (Elastic, MongoDB) have their own flavors of it; lawyers are hard at work. Built from the ground up for the cloud instead of simply installing Kafka on cloud infrastructure to give you a … And the Open Source community will question Confluent’s approach too, suggesting that, perhaps, open source is simply not a good business model. In this article, we will go through the process of building a distributed, scalable, fault-tolerant, microservice-oriented data pipeline using Kafka, Docker, and Cassandra While they’re not breaking any rules in doing so, they didn’t commit any code to the project. Confluent vs. Databricks. Elastic has done that with their security plugins, and Confluent is doing the same with two products: their security offering and their global Kafka offering. In fact, he says that the only parties the license change will affect are those who attempt to sell Confluent KSQL, Confluent Schema Registry, Confluent Connectors or Confluent REST Proxy. They started being open-source (REST Proxy, Schema Registry, KSQL) but most of them are now moved into the “source-available”. Originally developed as a queuing system, it has been broadened in recent releases to … For obvious reasons the Open Source Initiative, and others might conclude that Confluent is no longer Open Source. 3. Confluent creates a more simple approach to building applications with Kafka, connecting data sources to the solution as well as monitoring, securing and managing the Kafka infrastructure. Confluent had no choice but to question whether it makes sense for them to bankroll an open source enterprise grade product only to have cloud providers grab it and sell it. This post explains the common confusion which most of the people have on the reference of Kafka , Apache Kafka & Confluent Kafka and the differences that they have. Apache Pulsar. It is enabled through using a proprietary broker that is a “fork” of Apache Kafka, named “Confluent Server”. Other companies such as Aiven circumvented this by re-implementing their own Schema Registry for example. In the last part, I discuss the tough balance of choosing what is open-source and what isn’t. One very notable player is Amazon Web Services (AWS). Selling open source software as a service is something ANY company can do, thanks to the permissive Apache 2.0 license terms. A short case study of the tough act of balancing between OSS and proprietary, Disclaimer: This is my own analysis and is based on interpretation of public information. In Confluent’s case, this means in a nutshell that the code is available for everyone to see and use, although not resell as a service unless a special license is obtained. This blocks cloud providers such as AWS to offer managed Confluent Schema Registry or KSQL without doing a full re-implementation of these. Deploying software yourself, maintaining the infrastructure and paying for support may not make economical sense for every company. Here’s how Confluent c-founder and CEO explained it in a blog post: “The major cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba and Google) all differ in how they approach open source. Allow Consumers to Fetch from the Closest Replica, Replace ZooKeeper with a Self-Managed Metadata Quorum, 5 Tips To Quickly Tackle Errors in Your Production Code, 7 Essential Features of Visual Studio Code for Web Developers, Django & EmberJS Full Stack Basics: Connecting Frontend and Backend — Part 1, 10 NodeJs Things You Should Know & Master to be a Pro. While open-source software (OSS) is free to use and resell for anyone, private corporations are spending huge quantities of money (the cost being their employees’ salaries) to maintain and improve open-source projects. But we think the right way to build fundamental infrastructure layers is with open code. 100% Open Source Apache Kafka including Kafka Connect, MirrorMaker, Zookeeper and Kafka Streams. Hope you enjoyed reading this article, let me know your thoughts in the comments! Last Friday Confluent, maker of the Kafka-based streaming platform. This would not be possible without this KIP: The “observers replicas”, as far as I know, are proprietary to Confluent Server but would work with vanilla Apache Kafka clients. With Kafka, for example, AWS makes it easy to start and run a Kafka cluster.”. This is because the company is actively developing and fixing the core project. Since being created and open sourced by LinkedIn in 2011, Kafka has quickly evolved from messaging queue to a full-fledged event streaming platform. For enterprises who want to consume an enterprise grade Apache Kafka streaming platform, can AWS offer the same caliber product and support that Confluent can. Calling for volunteers, time will tell! You might blame Amazon, they took much of the goodness that the Apache Kafka community created, built some proprietary code around it, and started to offer it as a paid service. Kafka is also available as managed service offerings on all major cloud platforms via Confluent Cloud and others. Therefore these corporations must find a viable and healthy economical model around these open-source projects. Apache Kafka is an open source software originally created at LinkedIn in 2011. This makes it easy for any of their customers to obtain a fully working Apache Kafka cluster in minutes. Nonetheless, this licensing model works and applies to any Kafka setup: on-premise, in any cloud, on VM, on Kubernetes, or a mix. As such, what makes sense is to rely on Confluent for support, because Confluent makes most of the contribution to the Apache Kafka project and will have the most expertise. These decisions have a huge impact on reputation and profitability. It’s clear these contributions to the OSS project do improve the Apache Kafka project in meaningful ways. confluent-kafka is a tool in the PyPI Packages category of a tech stack. It is already battle-tested for processing trillions of messages and petabytes of data per day. Here’s Anderson’s explanation: “When Amazon creates a managed service, they focus on making it easy to start or deploy the technology. Not much, according to Confluent co-founder and CEO Jay Kreps. Such metrics are quite often an indicator of how popular … More importantly, it is supported by Confluent . By the way, you can learn Kafka with me here: https://www.kafka-tutorials.com/. that enables companies to easily access data as real-time streams, announced that it was changing its open source Apache 2.0 license to the Confluent Community License. Confluent's Python client for Apache Kafka. Here’s a link to Confluent.Kafka 's open source repository on GitHub Last Friday Confluent, maker of the Kafka-based streaming platformthat enables companies to easily access data as real-time streams, announced that it was changing its open source Apache 2.0 license to the Confluent Community License. Apache Pulsar is an open-source distributed messaging system. For enterprises who are mandated to choose open source products first, will Confluent, through their eyes, still be regarded as open source? AWS also has the means to make their own proprietary software to mimic any API, such as Aurora for PostgreSQL (meant to compete with Oracle), or DocumentDB to compete with MongoDB. All of the companies who use the project benefit from those contributions. It’s definitely possible for other companies to sell support, and this is something Cloudera (Hortonworks) and others are doing. You can also compare their general user satisfaction: Confluent (99%) vs. Splunk Cloud (N/A%). The pricing model of Confluent Kafka is based on cloud usage, and typically it costs you around $0.11 per GB. Apache Kafka ® is free, and Confluent Cloud is very cheap for small use cases, about $1 a month to produce, store, and consume a GB of data. At its core, Kafka is designed as a replicated, distributed, persistent commit log that is used to power event-driven microservices or large-scale stream processing applications. Confluent Replicator vs MirrorMaker2.0 (open source) for multi-data center data Replication Published on January 14, 2020 January 14, 2020 • 9 Likes • 0 Comments Controversial discussion: Use Apache Kafka as middleware! I’m trying to remain as impartial as possible and intend for this blog to be a case study around the OSS revenue model. Apache Kafka works as a distributed pub Creating your own range of proprietary closed-source software is one of the best ways to thrive and survive as a company in the long run. Cloudera’s biggest problems may not be Hadoop related, Teradata’s re-branding isn’t the real story, Databricks stays true to its open source roots, why it matters, Confluent makes the case for serverless Apache Kafka on its Cloud, not AWS, Cloudera surrenders two board seats to activist investor Carl Icahn. Amazon Web Services, on the other hand, makes its money by servicing customers in a different way. Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform, and one of the five most active projects of the Apache Software Foundation. Kafka Connect is a free, open-source component of Apache Kafka® that works as a centralized data hub for simple data integration between databases, key-value stores, search indexes, and file systems. As your usage scales and your requirements become more sophisticated, your cost will scale too. Until now, the company has relied on a single license to cover its open source offerings, Apache 2.0, which is a favorite among enterprise users because it allows the code to be incorporated within proprietary projects. Confluent Platform 5.0, based on yesterday's release of open source Kafka 2.0, adds enterprise security, new disaster recovery capabilities, lots of … The value proposition to customers is that they will be able to support, training, easier operations, and bug fixes. This is something Confluent has been doing for a while. That’s because Confluent, the commercial sponsor behind the popular open source project, introduced a free Kafka-as-a-Service tier in its cloud. On top of this, employees usually need to be well trained and will learn while on the job when encountering bugs or faults. For instance, here you may match Confluent’s overall score of 8.9 against Splunk Cloud’s score of 8.6. May be due to the usage of the Term Kafka in various contexts .