Amazon MSK Reviews

We use the software to facilitate building integrations between systems.

Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems.

The product's schema support needs enhancement. It will help enhance integration with many kinds of languages of programming languages, especially for environments using languages like .NET. They should build schema access as efficiently as developed by Confluent Cloud.

We have been using Amazon MSK for two years. At present, we use the latest version.

I rate the product's stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the product's scalability an eight out of ten.

The technical support services need improvement.

Positive

The software can be deployed on the cloud and has a simple setup process.

Amazon MSK generates a return on investment in terms of reducing integration time.

The platform has better pricing than one of its competitors.

We evaluated Confluent as well. However, we decided to go with Amazon MSK due to its good pricing.

I advise others to understand the exact business requirements before purchasing. I rate Amazon MSK a six out of ten.

My use cases were primarily in the banking domain, where we tracked real-time transactions.

Apart from real-time transactions, we also had another project in the retail domain. Our client's name was McDonolad, and their focus was on package delivery. By "package," I mean the customized burgers created at their restaurant that needed to be delivered to various restaurant locations. When customers visit their restaurant, they would order their personalized burgers. Sometimes, customers would request specific ingredients that were not available in the pre-made burgers displayed at the counter. The restaurant faced the challenge of understanding why customers were not opting for ready-made burgers or patties. To address this issue, they aimed to enhance their product by offering customized burgers. These customized burgers had to be prepared according to the customer's specific preferences. To achieve this, they started taking orders from customers. 

However, it was difficult to determine the exact taste or requirements the customers were looking for. To overcome this, they decided to transfer all the customer's order data to the Kafka server for streaming. This allowed the restaurant's backend system to analyze the data and understand the customer's new tastes and requirements. By collecting this data, they were able to enhance their product and make necessary changes to improve customer satisfaction.

Using Exabeam has provided one valuable aspect, which is the availability of separate agents for Windows and Linux. However, there is a difference when it comes to Linux. On Linux, we need to perform certain command line operations, whereas, for Windows, we have the convenience of an MSI package. One thing I personally feel is that it would be beneficial to have command line installation for Windows as well. 

Additionally, we have to install the package one by one on each server. It would be really helpful if Amazon MSK could provide a single installation that covers all the servers. If there are multiple servers, I would otherwise need to perform individual installations on each one. All of my servers are either VDI or virtual machines, so I have to log in to each virtual machine, copy the necessary files, and then initiate the installation. In future releases, I would like to see if there a probability of having a one-click installation that can be applied to all servers.

I have been using Amazon MSK for more than two years. 

It is a stable product. However, the only problem that we faced was with one of the servers running an older version of Windows.

We faced an issue where the latest package of the log collector or agent collector could not be installed on these older versions.  So at that time only, we connected with DuoSAPI from the IBM side. And he has to go through those issues.

I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten. We faced some issues, but I am not sure what caused those issues. 

Overall, I would rate Amazon MSK a seven out of ten. The only reason I am giving it seven is because I have not used all the aspects of this solution. 

Only thing I would suggest is to go through the documentation before starting anything. Amazon has already provided documentation on its site, which is highly informative. If there are still any issues or questions, users can directly raise a support ticket with the support center. In fact, they may not even need to raise a support ticket because the documentation already covers everything, including instructions on how to install agent collectors on Windows or Linux machines.

We chose MSK over Kinesis Data because it was mainly cost driven based on volumes. So the amount of workflow that flows through MSK compared to Kinesis, the Kafka clusters were much cheaper. Overall, it is very cost-effective based on the workflow. But it will be cost-effective to connect to the support for a smaller workload.

There's a bit of operational overhead, but it's not a transmission. It's something you can live with because the setting out of the Kafka cluster is less managed compared to Kinesis. Once it's set up, everything goes smoothly without going through that operational overhead again. So maybe that could be some disadvantage, but it's not a transmission related to what you're getting from Kafka. Operational overhead for setting up the Kafka cluster compared to the Kinesis data stream is easier. For Kinesis, you have to do a few clicks and your data stream is ready if I need to do some config to set up the transfer.

The solution does not auto-scale.

The pricing can be improved.

I have been using the solution for two-three months. We always use the latest version because there's no specific version requirement. So we always default to the latest if there's no specific version.

It has been a stable solution for the time we have been using it. But it is a new solution, so cannot be commented on stability.

The solution is scalable even though it does not autoscale. Because if you do keep it manually when you add a note to the cluster and then you register it, then it is scalable, but the fact that you have to go and do it, I think, makes it, again, a bit of some operational overhead when managing the cluster. Compared to Kinesis, where auto-scale is based on the load. I rate it six out of ten.

I will say it's good based on the support plan you have. But, it's good so far we don't have any issues with the support so far. I rate it ten out of ten.

The initial setup was straightforward, as I've worked with Kafka before. I am familiar with how to set up the cluster on the initial setup. It was simple for me, I did work with Kafka, but we set it up on-prem. So setting up the MSK was familiar to me. It was something that I'd done a few times before. 

The deployment was quick because it had three nodes, so it wasn't a massive cluster. So it took less than ten minutes. Only one engineer is required for the installation. 

The project is still new. I wonder if maintenance is needed because the MSK is already provisioned. Also, we are busy looking at something else now. So once the whole thing is integrated, we will know which maintenance is required.

The pricing depends on your use case. If you have a small use case, it will be expensive. But if you have a bigger load, it's reasonable because when you compare it to Kinesis data streams on the same workload it's managed, you don't have to keep nodes up to seven. But if you have a bigger workload on the other end, you can use all those compute and CPU resources to their fullest on MSK. The pricing could be made cheaper.

MSK has a monthly licensing cost of fifty dollars.

My advice would be to compare it with other details, too, like Data streaming services, and then see which is cheaper than the other based on the use case. Because if you need to pass maybe a hundred messages through a day, then Kinesis would be much cheaper than setting up a Kafka cluster. And the other thing is with the Kafka cluster; you need a minimum of three nodes for higher availability. So having to set up a cluster for just a hundred messages daily. That's overkill. And, it becomes expensive in that sense.

I rate it eight out of ten.

We are only using Amazon MSK for basic use cases.

The most valuable feature of Amazon MSK is the integration.

Amazon MSK could improve on the features they offer. They are still lagging behind Confluence.

I have been using Amazon MSK for one month.

Amazon MSK is stable.

The scalability of Amazon MSK is good.

We have four or five users using the solution in my organization. We plan to increase the usage of the solution in the future.

The initial setup of Amazon MSK is straightforward.

The price of Amazon MSK is less than some competitor solutions, such as Confluence.

I rate the price of Amazon MSK a four out of five.

My advice to others is this solution is straightforward and the integration is flawless.

I rate Amazon MSK a seven out of ten.

Behind the scenes, we use Kafka. We tried using MSK to collect old data surrounding inventory from e-commerce websites, for example.

MSK should be easier to integrate with other solutions. It should be more flexible, integration-wise.

MSK has a private network that's an out-of-the-box feature. For our case, we needed something public. We can't handle private-only. So, in order to make the data public, we had to do some extra work. It became too risky for us. That's the main reason we stopped using it.

I didn't use Amazon MSK very long; I was just running some evaluations on it. 

I haven't used this solution enough to know if there are any bugs present.

It's quite scalable. I didn't notice any scalability concerns while I was evaluating it. As it's cluster-based, I didn't see any limitations, scalability-wise. I think it's pretty easy to scale out.

I haven't used technical support directly related to this solution; however, I have contacted Amazon support for other solutions. Most of the time, they're helpful, but sometimes they're not. When I started using AWS roughly nine years ago, the support was very good. Recently, it seems as though the support is less knowledgeable. 

I don't think it's too complicated. It's pretty straightforward.

If you're interested in using this solution, be sure to do some POC before integrating it. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

Kafka is open-source software. In order for you to leverage it behind the scenes, you have to use ZooKeeper, which is essentially a type of server — you have to integrate with it. If you don't use MSK, then you'll have to do this manually, by yourself. MSK has already launched ZooKeeper and the cluster. This is included as an out-of-the-box feature, which is very convenient. 

We are currently running tests and experimenting with other solutions.

The configuration seems a little complex and the documentation on the product is not available.

I have used this solution for one month. 

It offers good stability. 

It is a scalable solution. 

We were already users of AWS, so trying Amazon MSK was a logical choice for us.

The initial setup is fairly complex. If you are new to it, it demands certain knowledge and technical fluency. 

It is important to understand completely the technology stack for the solution to be utilized properly, but there is a lack of information availability. Overall, I would rate it seven out of ten.