As a  developer, I came with many blogs on Rabbit-Mq and Kafka, but I read a post 2 years ago which helped me a lot to understand how these message-broker works.

These two solutions have different architecture but solve many different problems and helping in software development for smooth communication.

From my experience and idea today I am writing a blog, hopefully, it will help all to get a better understanding of two.

Rabbit-Mq and Apache Kafka?

RabbitMQ is a distributed open-source message broker, it originally implements the Advance Message Queuing Protocol(AMQP). AMQP standardized messages using Producers, Brokers, and Consumers. AMQP standards use designed with the following main qualities: Security, Reliability, Interoperability.

Apache Kafka is also a distributed event streaming platform, it focuses on raw throughput. Kafka is a straightforward routing message, that sends message to any particular topic.

RabbitMq? or Apache Kafka?

Yes, Both are not the same services, many of us often narrow down our messaging options to these two, but they always left wondering which of them is better. I’ve long believed that is not the correct question. Instead, we want to focus on what each service excels at, analyze their differences, and then only decide which of the two best fits our requirements. 

Requirements and Use Cases

RabbitMq’s message broker design is excelled in use cases that had specific routing needs and per-message guarantees, whereas Apache Kafka’s append-only log allowed developers access to their stream history and more direct stream processing. While the Venn diagram of use cases these two technologies could fulfill was very tight, Once there were scenarios in which one was comparatively better than the other.

While RabbitMQ continues to offer its traditional queue model, it also introduces a new data structure modeling an append-only log, with non-destructive Consuming Semantic. This data structure will work much like Kafka’s persistent log and will be exciting for RabbitMQ users looking to expand their streaming use case. And while these features will be compatible with the AMQP protocol, it also introduces a binary-based Stream Protocol.

From Developers End

Most of the developers on these services told the same, also thanked its community for increasing the list of clients and libraries for better growth of the development field. Both RabbitMq and Kafka's client libraries are growing continuously at a steady rate.

One thing noted that the growth of Apache Kafka Stream, a client library implementation that makes it easier for developers to process Streaming Data. It’s used for the common use case of reading data from Apache-Kafka, processing it, and writing it to another Kafka queue. KSQLDB is well worth checking out for developers looking to build streaming applications while taking advantage of their familiarity with relational databases.

Similarly, it can be accomplished with RabbitMQ with the help of some other pieces, like Spring Cloud Database. Furthermore, the upcoming streaming changes coming for RabbitMQ can open new ways of interacting with RabbitMQ for the developer.

Security & Operations

 RabbitMQ ships with a useful administration interface to manage users and Queues, while Apache-Kafka relies on TLS and JAAS. Whether you choose Rabbit-MQ or Apache-Kafka will of course depend on your specific requirements and your use case, but most security scenarios can have a proper conclusion with either technology.

Performance

If we talk about performance, it can be hard to justify as so many variables coming into play, including how configured the services, how our code interaction is, and of course also the hardware it’s running on play an important role. Everything from Network to memory and Disk speed can impact the performance of the service. Of course, both RabbitMQ and Kafka optimize for performance, but we should also make sure the use case leverages them to maximize efficiency.

Conclusion

Deciding whether to use Rabbit-MQ or Apache-Kafka was never easy, and with both technologies improving every day, the margins of advantage have only gotten smaller. The decision can make will depends on our individual Scenario.