Aiven Platform vs Apache Flink comparison

"The performance of Aiven Platform is quite good, as I have not seen any downtime, and it is very reliable, with backups in place, allowing me to fetch data without experiencing any high latency, even as a free tier user."

"One of the most valuable features of Aiven Platform is that it handles the upgrades for us seamlessly, saving us time that would be spent on routine upgrades."

"What I like best about the tool is that the process for the services is faster compared to other methods. It's easier to use because Aiven for Apache Kafka handles the maintenance, so we have less to manage. We only use Kafka to manage its connectivity."

"Flink moved on to becoming a standard technology for location platform."

"The product helps us to create both simple and complex data processing tasks. Over time, it has facilitated integration and navigation across multiple data sources tailored to each client's needs. We use Apache Flink to control our clients' installations."

"It is user-friendly and the reporting is good."

"This is truly a real-time solution."

"Apache Flink offers a range of powerful configurations and experiences for development teams. Its strength lies in its development experience and capabilities."

"The event processing function is the most useful or the most used function. The filter function and the mapping function are also very useful because we have a lot of data to transform. For example, we store a lot of information about a person, and when we want to retrieve this person's details, we need all the details. In the map function, we can actually map all persons based on their age group. That's why the mapping function is very useful. We can really get a lot of events, and then we keep on doing what we need to do."

"Among all of this, if I would talk about streaming, Apache Flink wins hands down, but there are other products like Apache Pulsar which I have no idea."

"Apache Flink provides faster and low-cost investment for me; I find it to have low hardware requirements, and it's faster with low code, meaning it's easy to understand for moving the streaming data."

"I would really like to see Aiven Platform add a user interface for database backups, as this would eliminate the need for a third-party solution."

"One challenge we face is when we want to update the version, for example, from 3.6 to 3.7. It will spawn new nodes, and then there's rebalancing and syncing from other brokers. There's high CPU usage during this process, so the solution can't be used for a while, causing some downtime in our services. To tackle this challenge, we schedule maintenance updates during low-traffic periods when there's less risk and fewer users use the services."

"The technical support from Apache is not good; support needs to be improved. I would rate them from one to ten as not good."

"Apache should provide more examples and sample code related to streaming to help me better adapt and utilize the tool."

"PyFlink is not as fully featured as Python itself, so there are some limitations to what you can do with it."

"The TimeWindow feature is a bit tricky. The timing of the content and the windowing is a bit changed in 1.11. They have introduced watermarks. A watermark is basically associating every data with a timestamp. The timestamp could be anything, and we can provide the timestamp. So, whenever I receive a tweet, I can actually assign a timestamp, like what time did I get that tweet. The watermark helps us to uniquely identify the data. Watermarks are tricky if you use multiple events in the pipeline. For example, you have three resources from different locations, and you want to combine all those inputs and also perform some kind of logic. When you have more than one input screen and you want to collect all the information together, you have to apply TimeWindow all. That means that all the events from the upstream or from the up sources should be in that TimeWindow, and they were coming back. Internally, it is a batch of events that may be getting collected every five minutes or whatever timing is given. Sometimes, the use case for TimeWindow is a bit tricky. It depends on the application as well as on how people have given this TimeWindow. This kind of documentation is not updated. Even the test case documentation is a bit wrong. It doesn't work. Flink has updated the version of Apache Flink, but they have not updated the testing documentation. Therefore, I have to manually understand it. We have also been exploring failure handling. I was looking into changelogs for which they have posted the future plans and what are they going to deliver. We have two concerns regarding this, which have been noted down. I hope in the future that they will provide this functionality. Integration of Apache Flink with other metric services or failure handling data tools needs some kind of update or its in-depth knowledge is required in the documentation. We have a use case where we want to actually analyze or get analytics about how much data we process and how many failures we have. For that, we need to use Tomcat, which is an analytics tool for implementing counters. We can manage reports in the analyzer. This kind of integration is pretty much straightforward. They say that people must be well familiar with all the things before using this type of integration. They have given this complete file, which you can update, but it took some time. There is a learning curve with it, which consumed a lot of time. It is evolving to a newer version, but the documentation is not demonstrating that update. The documentation is not well incorporated. Hopefully, these things will get resolved now that they are implementing it. Failure is another area where it is a bit rigid or not that flexible. We never use this for scaling because complexity is very high in case of a failure. Processing and providing the scaled data back to Apache Flink is a bit challenging. They have this concept of offsetting, which could be simplified."

"The solution could be more user-friendly."

"Amazon's CloudFormation templates don't allow for direct deployment in the private subnet."

"We have a machine learning team that works with Python, but Apache Flink does not have full support for the language."

"The state maintains checkpoints and they use RocksDB or S3. They are good but sometimes the performance is affected when you use RocksDB for checkpointing."

"This is an open-source platform that can be used free of charge."

"The solution is open-source, which is free."

"Apache Flink is open source so we pay no licensing for the use of the software."

"It's an open-source solution."

"It's an open source."