All Aiven for Apache Kafka Reviews
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Filippo
Verified reviewer
Utilities, 1,001-5,000 employees
Used daily for less than 12 months
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
3
VALUE FOR MONEY
3
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed October 2017
It has been a game changer in our business
It saved us from the hassle to manage Kafka cluster ourselves, with a very fast response customer support
PROSIt provides a working out of the box Kafka with REST API, Schema Registry, and Kafka Connect. It also makes available a very powerful REST API and command line tool to manage the services. Topics ACL and per user certificates are a very good addition for any non-trivial use case.
CONSSome available settings are not very well documented. Also using Kafka is not the most trivial things in the hearth. Would be good to have more detailed monitoring maybe coupled with InfluxDb that is already available in Aiven
Vendor Response
Thank you Filippo for your comments. We¿re glad to hear you have enjoyed using Aiven! Aiven provides detailed gathering of Kafka telemetry and subsequent visualization through built-in dashboards using Aiven PostgreSQL(TimescaleDB) and Aiven Grafana. Here's some links you might find useful: Aiven Service Integrations https://help.aiven.io/services/integrations/getting-started-with-service-integrations Aiven Kafka - Telemetry and Dashboards https://aiven.io/blog/gain-visibility-with-kafka-dashboards/ DataDog integration https://aiven.io/blog/datadog-meets-aiven/ Prometheus integration https://aiven.io/blog/prometheus-can-now-be-integrated-with-aiven/ Thanks again!
Replied February 2019
Russell
Information Technology and Services, 51-200 employees
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed August 2019
Our experiences deploying Kafka with Aiven
We are a very new customer but our experience has been good so far. They have taken a lot of headaches out of setting up a Kafka cluster. I am hopeful that this experience will carry over to production as we begin to deliver new projects using Kafka.
PROSWe liked that Aiven offered us a self service portal and is easy to integrate with our existing software stack. We have a number of environments in development requiring Kafka and they are able to offer us the level of flexibility we need. We are using Terraform in AWS so being able to provision everything using their Terraform provider is also beneficial to us. Setting up a cluster to the point where we are able to monitor it with our existing Prometheus is very easy to do thanks to their external integrations.
CONSThe documentation is lacking in some parts. Trying to set up logging to am external Elasticsearch cluster is difficult if you have your cluster secured with SSL. The terraform documentation is also lacking documentation and expects you to figure it out yourself from reading JSON.
Reason for choosing Aiven for Apache Kafka
For the reasons mentioned above, the main ones being flexibility with the self service offering.
Neeraj
Automotive, 10,000+ employees
Used daily for less than 6 months
OVERALL RATING:
3
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
3
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
2
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed May 2018
Good but not excellent
1. Kafka easy to maintain and easy to use, easy to scale up
PROS1. easy UI and scalability. easy to use kafka features easy and approachable team and easy to see logs.
CONS1. documentation is not proper. no steps mentioned anywhere for connectivity of aiven with other cloud or on premise clusters. 2. no troubleshooting steps available 3. very tough to use if face errors, as there is no way to go out as documents are not avilable in detail.
Vendor Response
Hi Neeraj, We appreciate your feedback! Just wanted to let you know that a limited amount (typically 1-2 days worth) of Aiven service logs are provided in the ¿Logs¿ tab for your service in the Aiven console. If you wish logs from a longer duration, you can use Logs Integration offered by Aiven. More information about this can be found at: https://help.aiven.io/elasticsearch/getting-started-with-elasticsearch-log-integration Thanks again!
Replied February 2019
Manjunath
Information Technology and Services, 201-500 employees
Used daily for less than 12 months
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
3
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
4
FUNCTIONALITY
3
Reviewed December 2019
Aiven Kafka Monitoring
Overall its good to quickly implement kafka for a fast paced environments and migrations.
PROSEasy to use, Configurable and with a built in setup of monitoring.
CONSSome of the parameters like consumer lag are not added in the monitoring graphs.
Reason for choosing Aiven for Apache Kafka
Honestly it's my managers call. They did not have any conclusions why we choose this.
Reasons for switching to Aiven for Apache Kafka
Scalability.
Anonymous
201-500 employees
Used weekly for less than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed June 2020
Up and ready in less than 5 minutes!
Perfect, I'm able to maintain 5 Kafka Clusters, everywhere, uptodate, without spending lot of time. The time to market is perfect.
PROSAiven is prod-ready in 5 minutes... Grab an account, pop your instances, and that's all! Integrated with Datadog, Hot patching, All-in-one (schema registry, kconnect, ...).
CONSKafka clusters are quite expensive, but still cheaper than running kafka by yourself
Reason for choosing Aiven for Apache Kafka
Aiven is a multi product platform, so I can run PGSQL, ES and Redis using the same platform
Anonymous
5,001-10,000 employees
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
4
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed February 2020
Good managed service
Very positive. It is my first experience with a managed Kafka service and I would recommend it over managing a cluster internally.
PROSI don't have to manage a Kafka cluster. The terraform provider has also proven to be very useful
CONSWe have experienced some issues with data being lost however this was quickly addressed and was put right by Aiven
Oleg
Verified reviewer
Computer & Network Security, 501-1,000 employees
Used daily for less than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
4
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
4
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed May 2019
My review
Kafka is used as queue for our project. We store customer reports in kafka streams
PROSIt's reliable and simple to administer. Support is answering questions in prompt manner.
CONSMissing some useful features. I was not able to configure Confluent connector. Aiven Kafka S3 Connector is missing some parameters like max size per file or max time interval per file.
Juhani
Information Technology and Services, 51-200 employees
Used daily for less than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed November 2022
Time saving solution
Rock solid, great value for money. We will never go back to self-hosted Kafka :)
PROSGreat documentation, very comprehensive integrations.
CONSThe built in log feature is very basic, although it can integrate with more complete products.
Reasons for switching to Aiven for Apache Kafka
Easier upgrades, monitoring and security.
Anonymous
1,001-5,000 employees
Used weekly for less than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed March 2018
Easy setup with many cloud providers and excellent support
a managed environment without the operational support from internal teams.
PROSSetup in minutes, uses reliable cloud providers, able to do VPC peering and easy management of the clusters.
CONSWhen we have the VPC peering, the cluster is not accessible from the public anymore, it would be nice if there is an option to have the kafka rest endpoint as public even in vpc peering.
Vendor Response
Thanks for the review. We¿re glad to hear your experience with Aiven has been good. About the feature you requested, it is currently available. Please contact Aiven support if you need this feature. Thank you again!
Replied February 2019
Anonymous
1,001-5,000 employees
Used daily for less than 12 months
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
4
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed October 2017
Seamless and full featured.
Seamless deploys of kafka without the burden of opsing it yourself. Up to date with the latest kafka and offers one click schema registry deploys as well.
CONSMore documentation of the web console please! Would love to more easily see the kafka configuration generated for the config specified via the UI.
Alex
Verified reviewer
Utilities, 1,001-5,000 employees
Used daily for less than 12 months
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed September 2018
Deploying Kafka doesn't need to be a Kafkaesque nightmare: Aiven can help you
Very positive!
PROS- Simple interface - Concepts are based on familiar devOps technologies, like manifestos in Kubernetes etc.
CONSNot much to complain. It's been smooth, apart from having to read documentation and play with some tutorials.
Martino
Used weekly for less than 12 months
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
2
FUNCTIONALITY
3
Reviewed November 2017
Good, if a bit limited and expensive.
no more downtime!
PROSIt works, it is reliable. The UI is pretty good, although doesn't work in Firefox very well :'( All in all, a good way to run kafka for some use cases. Oh my god there's a limit on the characters for the review? you're really making me work hard for that tshirt!
CONSExpensive, especially to increase storage. That is limiting, especially if you want to use Kafka for infinite durable, HA storage, which IMO is a very interesting use case. Some configs (e.g. `min.insync.replicas` = 1) are not ideal (see above). Changing them is hard (i'm told) and requires restarting the brokers, which cannot be done through the UI. Basically I wish the usecase of kafka-as-db had better support. As it stands, it's not really an option.
Vendor Response
Hi Martino, Thanks for the review! Regarding customizing Kafka settings (e.g. `min.insync.replicas` = 1), Aiven now provides the ability to set some advanced Kafka (broker-side) configuration settings. This can be accomplished via the Aiven commandline client (https://github.com/aiven/aiven-client). Here¿s an example of how to set this parameter in newer versions of Kafka. $ avn service types -v $ avn service update myservice -c ¿kafka_rest_config.producer_acks=2¿ # `kafka_rest_config.producer_acks¿ The number of acknowledgments the producer requires the leader to have received before considering a request complete. If set to 'all' or '-1', the leader will wait for the full set of in-sync replicas to acknowledge the record. Hope this helps and thank you again!
Replied February 2019
Mohamed
Utilities, 1,001-5,000 employees
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
4
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed April 2020
FOR THE MANY NOT THE FEW!
PROS
Honestly, it took me a while to get the hang of Kafka, I came from database background and I found it a bit of a steep learning curve, given we introduced schema registry as part of our initial implementation. As the business adoption grew I got forced into joining the round and I think the speed of Kafka is its biggest Pro.
CONSI think the UI could be improved, The schema view on the UI is also a little different from the avro format. dark mode would be nice!
Christopher
Utilities, 1,001-5,000 employees
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
4
FUNCTIONALITY
3
Reviewed October 2019
Good product with some annoying wrinkles
I enjoy using Aiven Kafka. Hosted Kafka Connect with the option to use custom connectors and transformers would be great.
PROSAiven Kafka is generally very stable, especially now that Kafka itself is becoming more mature
CONSThe security model has been very broken. Making an API call to get a certificate and being given a list of all the certificates in the project is simply wrong. Also, the UI does not always contain the same information that is output by the standard Kafka command line tooling.
David
Information Technology and Services, 11-50 employees
Used daily for less than 12 months
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
4
FUNCTIONALITY
3
Reviewed October 2017
Was able to get started very quickly and pushing data to a new Kafka cluster within minutes.
The ability to specify a specific data center in Azure to ensure it is as close as possible to the rest of our applications. How easy it is to configure in the dashboard.
CONSOptions for extended retention periods. We had thoughts of using Kafka data retention as our source of all historical data, but the limited retention periods were problematic. Perhaps an option to specify longer, or hook it into our own storage.
Vendor Response
Thank you for your honest feedback David. First, we'd like to apologize for not making it readily apparent that we do have this feature available. Second, here is our help article on the available options to extend your retention periods: http://help.aiven.io/kafka/kafka-data-retention Third, we are currently working on a process to ensure that our clients stay abreast of the features available to them so stay tuned! Thanks again!
Replied October 2017
Jesse
Used daily for less than 6 months
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
4
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed February 2018
A relatively easy to use solution to the Kafka/Zookeeper problem
It's super simple to set up and do some basic monitoring. The fact that I could spin up a kafka cluster in minutes with a click of a button instead of spend hours or days setting one up in kubernetes is amazing
CONSI with the web console had more utilities for things like testing and modifying offsets. More metrics about the state of kafka would be nice too
Vendor Response
Hello Jesse, We appreciate your feedback! First, resetting consumer group offsets can be accomplished per Aiven help documentation: https://help.aiven.io/kafka/getting-started/viewing-and-resetting-consumer-group-offsets Second, Aiven provides detailed gathering of Kafka telemetry and subsequent visualization through built-in dashboards using Aiven PostgreSQL(TimescaleDB) and Aiven Grafana. Here's some links you might find useful: Aiven Service Integrations https://help.aiven.io/services/integrations/getting-started-with-service-integrations Aiven Kafka - Telemetry and Dashboards https://aiven.io/blog/gain-visibility-with-kafka-dashboards/ DataDog integration https://aiven.io/blog/datadog-meets-aiven/ Prometheus integration https://aiven.io/blog/prometheus-can-now-be-integrated-with-aiven/ Thanks again and we hope you find this helpful!
Replied February 2019
clarence
Utilities, 1,001-5,000 employees
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
4
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed March 2020
It's works
Save us having to manage parts our own infrastructure. I started out as a front-ender and now having to do more and more dev ops. It's nice to have more of our infrastructure managed by someone else we feel trust towards.
CONSHaven't come across anything Aiven specific that's been a pain.
Patrick
Media Production, 51-200 employees
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed July 2019
Intuitive Data Platform
Creating a data platform for tracking user interaction events as well as creating pub-sub architecture for service communication.
PROSThe UI/UX makes it extremely simple to setup new clusters and makes it extremely clear as to what you're spinning up, it's state, etc. Integration between services is also very intuitive.
CONSI know it's a best practice beyond SSL/HTTPS, but enforcing basic auth is a bit of a pain when you're first starting a proof-of-concept. And believe it or not adding basic auth credential providers in some languages/packages isn't as clear as it should be.
Reason for choosing Aiven for Apache Kafka
Amazon MSK made integration with some of the open source packages difficult, so we nixed them. Confluent's pricing was a bit much especially given they artificially cap throughput. On top of that, at the time they weren't providing a fully managed schema registry.
Anonymous
1,001-5,000 employees
Used daily for less than 12 months
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
4
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
3
Reviewed September 2018
Great service
Fantastic support who answers questions swiftly. Easy to use and to setup users/ACL's.
CONSNot reactive UI to monitor the Kafka topic. Logs can be improved as well.
Vendor Response
Hello, Thank you for your honest feedback. It¿s great to hear you have enjoyed using Aiven. Just wanted to let know that Aiven now provides Logs Integration via Elasticsearch which enables you to store and search many months worth of Aiven Kafka service logs. You can find more information from this help article about log integrations: https://help.aiven.io/elasticsearch/getting-started-with-elasticsearch-log-integration Thank you!
Replied February 2019
shijiyas
Information Technology and Services, 11-50 employees
Used daily for less than 12 months
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
3
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed July 2019
Need to give more support to C#
Its good. But,I am using KAFKA as a mediator between my admin panel and API.So,using KAFKA is slowing down my process to a small amount.
PROSI am getting a better stability on my results and able to track more clearly.Also,KAFKA helps me in scaling my API and Admin panel
CONSKAFKA support for IIS hosting/C# is very poor that i had to migrate my whole project to dotnet core to avoid this
Reason for choosing Aiven for Apache Kafka
I go through many reviews and finalize this. Also,am using AWS services,so preferred KAFKA
Anonymous
1,001-5,000 employees
Used daily for less than 12 months
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
4
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed October 2017
Using Kafka as a persistent queue for large amount data
It helped us build a scalable real-time analytics platform.
PROSScale well to handle large loads, resilient. Customer support from Aiven is reactive and competent, a pleasure to work with them.
CONSConfiguration is a bit difficult, there's a learning curve. In particular understanding the concepts of Kafka, the impact of configuration parameters, in order to have a setting corresponding to the need take some time. Fortunately, the Aiven team is able to help with helpful advices.
Priyabrata
E-Learning, 51-200 employees
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
4
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed November 2018
Done PoC with Aiven.Experience was too good
We were planning to move event-driven architecture and also looking for a service provider which will manage the Kafka Infra. We found Aiven is one of the best players in the market. Definitely, I would like to highlight their response to any of our queries and very good support. The man behind this achievement(PoC with Aiven Kafka) is PREM.
PROSIt's easy to use. Allow us to focus on our application logic instead of managing Kafka Infra. Good UI to use Kafka service.
CONSI hope It would be better if add more monitoring tool as well as partition balancing.
Vendor Response
Hello Priyabrata, Thank you for your review! We¿re happy to hear you¿ve enjoyed your experience so far. Regarding your comment on monitoring tools and partition balancing, topic rebalancing is a task that is taken care of for your by Aiven back-end monitoring and operations system. Monitoring for Aiven Kafka can be setup by using Service Integrations by following the blogs and documentation. Here's some links you might find useful: Aiven Service Integrations https://help.aiven.io/services/integrations/getting-started-with-service-integrations Aiven Kafka - Telemetry and Dashboards https://aiven.io/blog/gain-visibility-with-kafka-dashboards/ DataDog integration https://aiven.io/blog/datadog-meets-aiven/ Prometheus integration https://aiven.io/blog/prometheus-can-now-be-integrated-with-aiven/ Thanks again!
Replied February 2019
Anonymous
1,001-5,000 employees
Used daily for less than 12 months
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
4
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
4
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed March 2018
Using Kafka for messaging between many microservices belonging to different teams
No need for us to deal with setting up and running our own clusters. All that difficult work is done for us and we can get on with delivering useful functionality.
CONSSometimes useful information is hidden and hard to get hold of. Sometimes changes have occurred in Kafka without us expecting them. That said, the Aiven team are responsive to improvement suggestions so as issues occur they tend to get dealt with and the product improves.
MARCOS
Telecommunications, 501-1,000 employees
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
3
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
3
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed July 2019
Kafka improvements
- Flexible - Easy to Use - Modern - Velocity
CONS- Price - Support at Brazil - Roadmap and product developments
Ruben
Apparel & Fashion, 1,001-5,000 employees
Used daily for less than 6 months
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
5
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed November 2019
Aiven Kafka review
So far so good
PROSEase of use, good documentation, API, Terraform integration, aiven-client
CONSHandling SSL handshake integrations, basically
Reason for choosing Aiven for Apache Kafka
Price on Aiven is more competitive
Reasons for switching to Aiven for Apache Kafka
Speed of getting a cluster running and no need to administer the underlying servers