Company
Date Published
Author
Jay Clifford
Word count
1360
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

MQTT and Kafka are two popular messaging protocols used in IoT infrastructure, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. MQTT is a lightweight protocol suitable for low-bandwidth and low-latency applications, while Kafka is a more robust protocol designed for high-throughput and fault-tolerance. Kafka offers features such as schema design, high availability, data persistence and durability, topic design and partitioning, which can be beneficial in an IoT architecture. By utilizing partitions and record keys, Kafka can provide consistent ordering of records and parallelism for performance purposes. Additionally, Kafka Connect provides a catalog of powerful premade connectors for well-known enterprise systems and data storage engines like InfluxDB, allowing for seamless integration with existing ecosystems. However, Kafka may not be the best choice for IoT applications that require key data delivery features such as Keep-Alive and Last Will, which are more commonly found in MQTT.