Aiven for Apache Kafka

Avantages

It provides a working out of the box Kafka with REST API, Schema Registry, and Kafka Connect. It also makes available a very powerful REST API and command line tool to manage the services. Topics ACL and per user certificates are a very good addition for any non-trivial use case.

Inconvénients

Some available settings are not very well documented. Also using Kafka is not the most trivial things in the hearth. Would be good to have more detailed monitoring maybe coupled with InfluxDb that is already available in Aiven

Avantages

We liked that Aiven offered us a self service portal and is easy to integrate with our existing software stack. We have a number of environments in development requiring Kafka and they are able to offer us the level of flexibility we need.

We are using Terraform in AWS so being able to provision everything using their Terraform provider is also beneficial to us. Setting up a cluster to the point where we are able to monitor it with our existing Prometheus is very easy to do thanks to their external integrations.

Inconvénients

The documentation is lacking in some parts. Trying to set up logging to am external Elasticsearch cluster is difficult if you have your cluster secured with SSL. The terraform documentation is also lacking documentation and expects you to figure it out yourself from reading JSON.

Avantages

1. easy UI and scalability.
easy to use kafka features
easy and approachable team and easy to see logs.

Inconvénients

1. documentation is not proper. no steps mentioned anywhere for connectivity of aiven with other cloud or on premise clusters.
2. no troubleshooting steps available
3. very tough to use if face errors, as there is no way to go out as documents are not avilable in detail.

Avantages

Aiven is prod-ready in 5 minutes... Grab an account, pop your instances, and that's all! Integrated with Datadog, Hot patching, All-in-one (schema registry, kconnect, ...).

Inconvénients

Kafka clusters are quite expensive, but still cheaper than running kafka by yourself

Avantages

Easy to use, Configurable and with a built in setup of monitoring.

Inconvénients

Some of the parameters like consumer lag are not added in the monitoring graphs.

Avantages

- Simple interface
- Concepts are based on familiar devOps technologies, like manifestos in Kubernetes etc.

Inconvénients

Not much to complain. It's been smooth, apart from having to read documentation and play with some tutorials.

Avantages

It's reliable and simple to administer. Support is answering questions in prompt manner.

Inconvénients

Missing some useful features. I was not able to configure Confluent connector.

Aiven Kafka S3 Connector is missing some parameters like max size per file or max time interval per file.

Avantages

Sane pricing for solid Kafka hosting!
Awesome developer oriented api's for doing everything
Team is very responsive and helpful

Inconvénients

The UI for creating Kafka Connections is hard to use. They should just refer to Confluent documentation instead

Avantages

Ease of use is great. Support is fast and helpful.

Inconvénients

Cost is prohibitive when you need a lot of features (Kafka REST) but not a lot of throughput. We are paying for more capacity than we need in order to get those features.

Avantages

The product is great, it delivers what it promise, the doc is good, the connectors compatibility is one of the best features.

Inconvénients

It’s not about the product but about the documentation, I’m not an expert in kafka and I’d like to see some examples using spark streaming, it’s used a lot by the community.

Avantages

I don't have to manage a Kafka cluster. The terraform provider has also proven to be very useful

Inconvénients

We have experienced some issues with data being lost however this was quickly addressed and was put right by Aiven

Avantages

Fantastic support who answers questions swiftly. Easy to use and to setup users/ACL's.

Inconvénients

Not reactive UI to monitor the Kafka topic. Logs can be improved as well.

Avantages

Scale well to handle large loads, resilient. Customer support from Aiven is reactive and competent, a pleasure to work with them.

Inconvénients

Configuration is a bit difficult, there's a learning curve. In particular understanding the concepts of Kafka, the impact of configuration parameters, in order to have a setting corresponding to the need take some time. Fortunately, the Aiven team is able to help with helpful advices.

Avantages

No need for us to deal with setting up and running our own clusters. All that difficult work is done for us and we can get on with delivering useful functionality.

Inconvénients

Sometimes useful information is hidden and hard to get hold of. Sometimes changes have occurred in Kafka without us expecting them. That said, the Aiven team are responsive to improvement suggestions so as issues occur they tend to get dealt with and the product improves.

Avantages

It works, it is reliable. The UI is pretty good, although doesn't work in Firefox very well :'(
All in all, a good way to run kafka for some use cases.

Oh my god there's a limit on the characters for the review? you're really making me work hard for that tshirt!

Inconvénients

Expensive, especially to increase storage. That is limiting, especially if you want to use Kafka for infinite durable, HA storage, which IMO is a very interesting use case.

Some configs (e.g. `min.insync.replicas` = 1) are not ideal (see above). Changing them is hard (i'm told) and requires restarting the brokers, which cannot be done through the UI.

Basically I wish the usecase of kafka-as-db had better support. As it stands, it's not really an option.

Avantages

Aiven Kafka is generally very stable, especially now that Kafka itself is becoming more mature

Inconvénients

The security model has been very broken. Making an API call to get a certificate and being given a list of all the certificates in the project is simply wrong.
Also, the UI does not always contain the same information that is output by the standard Kafka command line tooling.

Avantages

Honestly, it took me a while to get the hang of Kafka, I came from database background and I found it a bit of a steep learning curve, given we introduced schema registry as part of our initial implementation. As the business adoption grew I got forced into joining the round and I think the speed of Kafka is its biggest Pro.

Inconvénients

I think the UI could be improved, The schema view on the UI is also a little different from the avro format.
dark mode would be nice!

Avantages

Great documentation, very comprehensive integrations.

Inconvénients

The built in log feature is very basic, although it can integrate with more complete products.

Avantages

Setup in minutes, uses reliable cloud providers, able to do VPC peering and easy management of the clusters.

Inconvénients

When we have the VPC peering, the cluster is not accessible from the public anymore, it would be nice if there is an option to have the kafka rest endpoint as public even in vpc peering.

Avantages

Seamless deploys of kafka without the burden of opsing it yourself. Up to date with the latest kafka and offers one click schema registry deploys as well.

Inconvénients

More documentation of the web console please! Would love to more easily see the kafka configuration generated for the config specified via the UI.

Avantages

Save us having to manage parts our own infrastructure. I started out as a front-ender and now having to do more and more dev ops. It's nice to have more of our infrastructure managed by someone else we feel trust towards.

Inconvénients

Haven't come across anything Aiven specific that's been a pain.

Avantages

- Very easy to use and setup and should not need customer support at all.
- when you do need customer support , they are super fast to respond.

Inconvénients

- API documentation is good , but can be better

Avantages

The ability to specify a specific data center in Azure to ensure it is as close as possible to the rest of our applications. How easy it is to configure in the dashboard.

Inconvénients

Options for extended retention periods. We had thoughts of using Kafka data retention as our source of all historical data, but the limited retention periods were problematic. Perhaps an option to specify longer, or hook it into our own storage.

Avantages

Our organization found it very easy to use. Using the hosted version we were able to get up and running quickly and were able to keep a number of databases in sync

Inconvénients

The list of connectors isn't as big natively as I would like however there are a good number of open source options available, you just need to compile and deploy them yourself

Avantages

The UI/UX makes it extremely simple to setup new clusters and makes it extremely clear as to what you're spinning up, it's state, etc. Integration between services is also very intuitive.

Inconvénients

I know it's a best practice beyond SSL/HTTPS, but enforcing basic auth is a bit of a pain when you're first starting a proof-of-concept. And believe it or not adding basic auth credential providers in some languages/packages isn't as clear as it should be.