Akka Streams And Kafka Streams: Where Microservices Meet Fast Data

Why Microservices & Fast Data Belong Together...

In a recent Lightbend survey, 75% of over 2400 developers reported to have at least some real-time functionality in their systems. Enterprises are realizing that the ability to extract value from streaming data in near real-time is the new competitive advantage.

Two technologies–Akka Streams and Kafka Streams–have emerged as popular tools to use with Apache Kafka for addressing the shared requirements of availability, scalability, and resilience for both streaming microservices and Fast Data. So which one should you use for specific use cases?

While both tools are part of Lightbend Fast Data Platform, they were designed for different needs and use cases: Akka Streams emerged as a dataflow-centric abstraction for the Akka Actor model, designed for general-purpose microservices, very low-latency event processing, and support for a wider class of application problems and third-party integrations via Alpakka. Kafka Streams, by comparison, is purpose-built for reading data from Kafka topics, processing it, and writing the results to new topics in a Kafka-centric way.

In this webinar by Dr. Dean Wampler, O’Reilly author and VP of Fast Data Engineering at Lightbend, we will:

• Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of Akka Streams and Kafka Streams for particular design needs in data-centric microservices, including code examples from our Kafka Streams with Akka Streams tutorial.
• Contrast them with Spark Streaming and Flink, which provide richer analytics over potentially huge data sets
• Help you map these streaming engines to your specific use cases, so you confidently pick the right ones for your projects

Watch The Full Video + QA (56 Min)

Additional Resources To Enjoy

• An Introduction To Fast Data: Get The Free O'Reilly eBook Fast Data Architectures for Streaming Applications
• Legacy System & Cloud Integrations with Alpakka: Pakk Your Alpakka: Reactive Streams Integrations For AWS, Azure, & Google Cloud
• What To Know About Using Apache Kafka: Putting Kafka In Jail - Best Practices To Run Kafka On Kubernetes & DC/OS
• Lightbend Fast Data Platform (PDF): Download our Fast Data Platform technical overview to learn more about our easy-on ramp for designing, building, and running streaming and Fast Data applications

As always, Lightbend is here to make your streaming, Fast Data journey successful. To find out more about our platform subscription, getting-started engagement services, or anything else, feel free to contact us below and schedule a 20-min introduction.

SET UP A 20-MIN CALL

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Author(s)

Oliver White

Director of Developer Marketing, Lightbend, Inc.

Twitter: @eOliverWhite

Oliver has been helping startups and enterprises tell their technology stories since 2007. As Chief Storyteller at Lightbend, Oliver has dedicated much of his time to creating educational content and building community awareness around Reactive system architecture and tooling. Oliver is a co-founder of Virtual JUG, the creator of the ZeroTurnaround (acquired by Perforce) content brand RebelLabs, and, somewhat unexpectedly, the coiner of the phrase “SMACK Stack”.