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Kafka Concepts For SQS User

The document compares Amazon SQS and Apache Kafka, highlighting their architectural differences and use cases. SQS is a managed message queuing service ideal for transient messages consumed by a single recipient, while Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform designed for high-throughput and low-latency processing of real-time data feeds. Key differentiators include message delivery semantics, ordering guarantees, scalability, fault tolerance, and data retention capabilities, with Kafka offering more robust features for complex event-driven architectures.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
8 views17 pages

Kafka Concepts For SQS User

The document compares Amazon SQS and Apache Kafka, highlighting their architectural differences and use cases. SQS is a managed message queuing service ideal for transient messages consumed by a single recipient, while Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform designed for high-throughput and low-latency processing of real-time data feeds. Key differentiators include message delivery semantics, ordering guarantees, scalability, fault tolerance, and data retention capabilities, with Kafka offering more robust features for complex event-driven architectures.

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naveen.goyal
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You are on page 1/ 17

Apache Kafka for SQS Experts: A Principal Engineer's Guide

to Event Streaming
1. Introduction: From Queues to Streams – A Paradigm Shift
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is recognized as a highly available and fully
managed message queuing service, excelling in decoupling microservices and
managing asynchronous tasks where messages are typically transient and consumed
by a single recipient.1 SQS operates on a "postal delivery system" model, where a
message resides in a queue until a single recipient retrieves it.2 This model is well-
suited for straightforward queuing needs, providing simplicity and minimal setup.1

In contrast, Apache Kafka is a distributed event store and stream-processing


platform, specifically engineered for high-throughput, low-latency handling of real-
time data feeds.1 Kafka functions more like a "radio broadcast network," where
messages are broadcast on a channel, known as a topic, allowing multiple listeners to
tune in simultaneously.2 Fundamentally, Kafka is a distributed, append-only,
immutable log, rather than a transient queue, which enables distinct capabilities such
as long-term message retention and replayability.1

The architectural divergence between SQS and Kafka is profound and directly
impacts their optimal use cases. SQS's queue-based nature means messages are
generally consumed and then removed or become invisible after a short retention
period, typically up to 14 days.2 This makes it ideal for scenarios requiring a
"destructive read," such as processing a background job once. Kafka's log-based
architecture, however, allows messages to persist for a configurable duration,
potentially indefinitely.2 This persistence means that multiple independent
applications can read the same event stream without affecting each other's progress.
This capability is pivotal for applications that require re-processing historical events,
such as for analytics, auditing, or rebuilding application state. Consequently, Kafka is
particularly well-suited for event sourcing, real-time analytics, and complex data
pipelines, where the ability to access and replay historical data is a core requirement.4
This fundamental difference in message model dictates the operational complexity
and the types of problems each system is best equipped to solve.

2. Kafka Core Architecture: The Distributed Log


Brokers, Topics, and Partitions
A Kafka cluster is composed of multiple brokers, which are servers responsible for
storing and serving data.1 Data streams within Kafka are organized into logical
categories called topics.6 Each topic is further subdivided into ordered partitions,
which serve as the fundamental unit of parallelism and ordering within Kafka.5 When a
producer publishes a new event to a topic, it is appended to the end of a specific
partition.9 For each partition, there is a designated leader broker that handles all
read and write requests, while other brokers act as followers, replicating the data to
ensure fault tolerance and high availability.7

The concept of partitioning is a cornerstone of Kafka's ability to achieve both high


throughput and strong ordering guarantees. SQS offers Standard queues with best-
effort ordering and FIFO queues with strict ordering, though FIFO queues typically
have lower throughput limits.3 Kafka, by contrast, provides strict ordering within
individual partitions.5 Each message within a partition is assigned a unique offset,
ensuring sequential appending.12 This design choice allows Kafka to distribute data
across numerous partitions and brokers, enabling parallel processing and thus
achieving high throughput. Without this partition-based design, maintaining global
ordering across a distributed system would severely constrain throughput. For
scenarios where strict global ordering is required, the common approach involves
using a single partition, which inherently limits parallelism.12 To balance ordering and
scalability, it is common practice to assign a message key to related events (e.g., an
order_id), ensuring that all messages pertaining to that entity are routed to the same
partition, thereby preserving their relative order while still allowing for distributed
processing across different keys.13

Producers
Kafka producers are client applications that publish messages to Kafka topics.14 A
Kafka message comprises several components: the actual data (serialized into a byte
array), an optional message key (crucial for partitioning), a timestamp, a
compression type, and headers.14 Upon receipt by the broker, a partition and offset ID
are added to the message.14 Producers initiate their connection by contacting a Kafka
bootstrap server, which helps them discover the full list of Kafka broker addresses
and identify the current leader for each topic partition.14 Messages are then sent
directly to the leader broker for the relevant partition using a highly optimized binary
TCP-based protocol.5

Before transmission, messages must be serialized into a byte array, as Kafka treats
message content as an opaque stream of bytes.14 The message key plays a critical
role in partitioning: by hashing the key, the producer's partitioner ensures that
messages with the same key are consistently routed to the same partition. This
mechanism is essential for maintaining the order of related events.13 If no message
key is provided, the producer defaults to either a round-robin or sticky partitioning
strategy.14

Producers offer various settings to balance message durability with performance. The
acks (acknowledgments) setting dictates how many brokers must confirm receipt of a
message before the producer considers the send successful. acks=all (or -1) provides
the strongest durability by waiting for all in-sync replicas to acknowledge, but
introduces the highest latency. acks=1 waits only for the leader, while acks=0 offers
the lowest latency by not waiting for any acknowledgment, at the highest risk of data
loss.14 Broker-side configurations such as replication.factor (number of copies
required for a topic) and min.insync.replicas (minimum in-sync replicas for acks=all to
succeed) further influence durability.10 For performance optimization, producers
buffer records and send them in batches. Key settings like batch.size (maximum bytes
per batch) and linger.ms (maximum time to buffer) are tuned to balance throughput
and latency.14

Consumers and Consumer Groups


Kafka consumers are client applications designed to read and process events from
brokers.8 Unlike SQS, which employs a push model where messages are delivered to
consumers and then removed after processing 1, Kafka utilizes a pull-based model.
Consumers explicitly issue fetch requests to brokers, specifying the log offset from
which they wish to begin reading.8 This pull mechanism grants consumers precise
control over their consumption rate and the flexibility to re-consume data if needed.8

For scalable consumption, Kafka introduces consumer groups. A consumer group is


a collection of consumers from the same application that collaboratively consume
messages from one or more topics.8 A fundamental rule within a consumer group is
that each partition within a topic is consumed by exactly one consumer at any given
time.8 This design facilitates parallel processing and load balancing across the
consumers in the group.9 Kafka employs a rebalance protocol to dynamically assign
partitions to consumers within a group. This process is triggered by changes in group
membership (e.g., consumers joining or leaving) or topic metadata.8 The group
coordinator, a component of the Kafka broker, manages this distribution, monitoring
consumer status via periodic heartbeats and reassigning partitions if a consumer fails
to send heartbeats within a specified timeout.8 If the number of consumers in a group
exceeds the number of partitions, some consumers will remain idle, acting as standby
units ready to take over in case of an active consumer failure.9

The consumer control and replayability inherent in Kafka's design represent a


significant strategic advantage over traditional queueing systems like SQS. SQS
messages are transient, with a limited retention period, and are typically removed
after successful consumption, representing a "destructive read".2 Kafka's durable
messages and its pull-based model, where consumers manage their own offsets,
enable multiple independent consumer groups to read the same data stream without
interfering with each other's progress.12 This capability is critical for building complex
event-driven architectures, supporting use cases such as event sourcing, where the
entire state of an application can be rebuilt by replaying the event log. It also
facilitates data warehousing and real-time analytics, where different downstream
systems may require full historical event data or specific subsets. This architectural
choice positions Kafka as a robust event streaming platform, not merely a message
queue, capable of serving as a central data backbone for diverse and sophisticated
applications.

Offsets
An offset is a unique, sequential integer identifier assigned to every message within a
specific partition.8 Consumers track their progress by committing these offsets, which
mark the last message successfully processed in a given partition.8 This consumer
state is relatively small and is durably stored in an internal Kafka topic named
__consumer_offsets.9 In the event of a consumer failure or restart, it can resume
consumption precisely from its last committed offset. This mechanism is crucial for
preventing duplicate processing (in at-least-once or exactly-once scenarios) or
avoiding data loss (in at-most-once scenarios), depending on the configured delivery
semantics.8

3. Key Differentiators & Advanced Concepts (Kafka vs. SQS)


Delivery Semantics
Understanding message delivery semantics is crucial for distributed systems. SQS
offers distinct guarantees based on queue type:
● SQS Standard Queues provide at-least-once delivery, meaning messages may
be delivered more than once, and offer best-effort ordering. Applications
consuming from standard queues must be designed to be idempotent to handle
potential duplicates.3
● SQS FIFO Queues guarantee exactly-once processing, ensuring each message
is delivered once and in the exact order it was sent, largely achieved through a 5-
minute deduplication interval.3

Kafka, by default, guarantees at-least-once delivery, but offers configurable options


for other semantics:
● At-Most-Once: Messages are delivered once, but may be lost if a system failure
occurs before processing is complete. This is achieved by disabling producer
retries and configuring consumers to commit offsets before processing
messages.20
● At-Least-Once (Default): Messages are delivered one or more times, ensuring
no message loss, but with the possibility of duplicates. This is the default
behavior when producers retry failed sends and consumers commit offsets after
processing. Applications must be designed to be idempotent to handle these
potential duplicates.20
● Exactly-Once: This semantic ensures each message is delivered once and only
once, even in the presence of failures, preventing both loss and duplication.
Kafka achieves this for internal Kafka-to-Kafka processing (e.g., Kafka Streams
applications) through the use of transactional producers and idempotent
producers.15 An idempotent producer guarantees that retrying a message send
will not result in duplicate entries in the log for a given producer session, by
assigning a unique producer ID and sequence numbers to messages.15 A
transactional producer extends this by allowing atomic writes to multiple
partitions and topics. Critically, the consumer's offset is committed within the
same transaction as the processed data, ensuring atomicity. For end-to-end
exactly-once guarantees, consumers must be configured to read only committed
messages by setting isolation_level=read_committed.16

While both SQS FIFO and Kafka offer "exactly-once" guarantees, their
implementations and the associated operational complexities differ significantly. SQS
FIFO's exactly-once processing, including deduplication, is largely managed by AWS,
abstracting away much of the underlying complexity.11 Kafka's "exactly-once"
requires explicit configuration and a deep understanding of its internal mechanisms,
such as producer IDs, sequence numbers, and transactional APIs.15 This means that
achieving exactly-once semantics in Kafka typically involves higher development
effort and operational overhead compared to SQS's managed offering. The
distinction is also in scope: Kafka's exactly-once often pertains to end-to-end
transactional guarantees across Kafka topics, while SQS's focuses on preventing
duplicate message delivery to a single consumer. A Principal Engineer must weigh this
trade-off: Kafka offers greater control and flexibility for complex transactional
workflows, while SQS provides a simpler, managed solution for basic deduplication.

Message Ordering
Kafka guarantees strict message ordering within a single partition.5 Messages are
appended sequentially to the log and assigned unique, monotonically increasing
offsets.12 However, global ordering across an entire topic with multiple partitions is
not guaranteed due to the distributed nature of writes and potential network
latency.12 To maintain ordering for related events, producers should utilize a message
key to ensure all messages for a specific entity (e.g., a user_id or order_id) are
consistently routed to the same partition.13 In contrast, SQS Standard queues do not
guarantee message ordering, whereas FIFO queues strictly preserve the order in
which messages are sent and received.3

Scalability and Fault Tolerance


Kafka is inherently designed for high throughput and linear scalability, capable of
handling vast amounts of data by horizontally scaling its cluster through the addition
of more brokers and the distribution of topic partitions across them.1 Consumer
groups further enhance scalability by allowing multiple consumers to process
different partitions concurrently.7 SQS, as a fully managed service, automatically
adjusts its capacity to handle varying message volumes.1

Kafka ensures fault tolerance and durability primarily through replication.1 Each
partition has multiple copies, or replicas, stored on different brokers. If a leader
broker fails, a new leader is automatically elected from the set of in-sync replicas
(ISRs), ensuring continuous data availability and minimal downtime.6 The
replication.factor (number of replicas) and min.insync.replicas (minimum number of
in-sync replicas required for a successful write) settings are critical configurations
that control the level of durability.10

Historically, Kafka relied on Apache ZooKeeper for distributed coordination tasks


such as leader election, configuration management, and membership tracking within
the cluster.6 However, modern Kafka deployments are transitioning to KRaft (Kafka
Raft), a built-in consensus protocol that replaces ZooKeeper for metadata
management.7 This evolution of Kafka's control plane significantly impacts its
operational footprint. Previously, managing Kafka involved the complexity of
operating two distinct distributed systems (Kafka and ZooKeeper). KRaft simplifies
Kafka's architecture by eliminating the need for an external system, reducing
operational overhead, and improving failover times by handling metadata directly
within the Kafka brokers.7 This shift represents a maturation of the Kafka platform,
making self-managed Kafka more appealing and robust by streamlining deployment
and management, while still offering granular control that differentiates it from fully
managed services like SQS.

Data Retention
SQS has a limited message retention period, typically up to 14 days.1 Messages are
automatically removed after this period or once they have been successfully
processed and deleted by a consumer. In contrast, Kafka offers highly configurable
message retention, with messages stored durably in append-only logs on disk,
potentially for indefinite periods.1

Two primary retention policies exist in Kafka:


● Time-based Retention: This is the most common approach, where messages
are retained for a specified duration (defaulting to 7 days or 168 hours). Once all
messages within a log segment exceed this configured age, the entire segment
becomes eligible for deletion.19
● Log Compaction (Key-based Retention): This is a unique and powerful feature
that ensures only the latest value for each message key is retained within a
topic's log.19 This mechanism is invaluable for maintaining the current state of a
system (e.g., user profiles, inventory levels) and for use cases such as restoring
state after system failures or reloading caches after application restarts.24 Log
compaction provides finer-grained, per-record retention compared to coarser-
grained time-based retention.19 Old updates for the same key are eventually
purged, but the ordering of messages is always maintained, and existing offsets
remain valid even if the corresponding message has been compacted away.24 A
message with a key and a null payload (known as a "tombstone") is treated as an
explicit delete marker for that key, which is also eventually cleaned out after a
configurable period (delete.retention.ms).24

Log compaction serves as a foundational element for building systems based on


event sourcing and robust state management in Kafka. SQS's limited retention and
destructive read model make it unsuitable for maintaining a comprehensive historical
record or rebuilding application state from scratch.2 Kafka's log compaction,
however, guarantees the retention of the latest state for each message key within the
log, making it ideal for restoring system state and reloading caches.24 This feature
transforms Kafka from a simple message bus into a powerful, distributed database
for event streams, allowing for durable, key-value state storage directly within the
event log. For a Principal Engineer, log compaction is a critical design pattern for
constructing resilient, stateful microservices and data systems, enabling efficient
storage of mutable data within an immutable log and simplifying disaster recovery for
stateful applications.

Ecosystem Components
Kafka is more than just a message broker; it functions as a comprehensive event
streaming platform with a rich and expanding ecosystem:
● Kafka Connect: This is a scalable framework designed to integrate Kafka with
various other data systems, including databases, file systems, and cloud
services.5 It utilizes pre-built or custom source connectors (to ingest data into
Kafka) and sink connectors (to export data from Kafka).25 Kafka Connect
simplifies data movement, effectively handling the "Extract" and "Load" stages of
ETL workflows, provides built-in fault tolerance, and supports Single Message
Transforms (SMTs) for inline data modification.25 It can be deployed in a
distributed mode for high scalability and resilience.25
● Kafka Streams: This is a lightweight client library for building real-time, scalable,
and fault-tolerant stream processing applications, primarily in Java.5 It enables
developers to perform high-level operations such as filtering, mapping, joining,
and aggregating data streams.5 Kafka Streams supports stateful processing by
leveraging local state stores (often backed by RocksDB) and changelog topics,
which are themselves Kafka topics.5 A key advantage is that Kafka Streams
applications are regular Java applications, simplifying their packaging,
deployment, and monitoring without requiring separate processing clusters.28 It
also supports interactive queries on the local state stores, providing immediate
access to processed data.27

The robust ecosystem components, Kafka Connect and Kafka Streams, are critical in
transforming Kafka from a mere message queue into a comprehensive data hub,
distinguishing it significantly from SQS. While SQS excels at "decoupling
microservices" and managing "simple task queues" by facilitating asynchronous
communication between two points 1, Kafka's ecosystem extends its capabilities far
beyond this. Kafka Connect enables the creation of "real-time data pipelines," "data
synchronization," and "ETL workflows".26 Simultaneously, Kafka Streams empowers
the development of applications for "real-time analytics," "fraud detection," and
"personalized marketing".28 This comprehensive suite of tools allows Kafka to act as a
central nervous system for an organization's data, enabling complex event-driven
architectures and real-time data processing that are not feasible with a basic
message queue. A Principal Engineer would strategically choose Kafka when
requirements extend beyond simple message passing to include real-time data
ingestion, transformation, complex analysis, and long-term event storage, leveraging
its platform capabilities to build a robust data backbone.

Table 1: Kafka vs. SQS Feature Comparison

Feature Amazon SQS Apache Kafka

Primary Model Message Queue (transient) Event Streaming Platform


(distributed log)

Management Fully Managed by AWS Self-managed (high


(minimal overhead) overhead) or Managed
Service (lower)

Message Retention Up to 14 days Configurable (indefinite),


supports log compaction

Message Order Standard: Best-effort; FIFO: Strict order within a partition


Strict Order

Delivery Guarantees Standard: At-least-once; Default: At-least-once;


FIFO: Exactly-once Configurable: Exactly-once
(idempotent/transactions)

Consumer Model Push-based (visibility timeout) Pull-based (consumer


manages offsets)

Scalability Automatic scaling by AWS Scales by adding brokers &


partitions; consumer groups
scale horizontally

Primary Use Case Simple queuing, decoupling High-throughput real-time


microservices, background data streaming, event
jobs sourcing, stream processing,
data pipelines

Complexity Low setup, minimal Higher setup & operational


management complexity (if self-managed)

Data Format Mainly simple text formats Any data format (JSON, Avro,
Protobuf)

4. Operational & Design Considerations for Principal Engineers


Security
Securing a Kafka cluster is a multi-layered endeavor, crucial for protecting sensitive
data and maintaining operational integrity.22
● Encryption (TLS/SSL): Transport Layer Security (TLS), often referred to as SSL,
is vital for encrypting data in transit. This ensures that data exchanged between
Kafka clients (producers, consumers) and brokers, as well as between brokers
themselves, remains confidential and secure from unauthorized interception or
tampering.29 While providing robust security, TLS/SSL encryption introduces a
small CPU overhead for both clients and brokers.30
● Authentication (SASL/SSL): Authentication verifies the identity of clients and
brokers attempting to connect to the Kafka cluster.
○ SSL Authentication leverages client certificates, signed by a Certificate
Authority (CA), for mutual (two-way) authentication between clients and
brokers.30
○ SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer) supports various
mechanisms, offering flexibility in security policies:
■ PLAIN: A straightforward username/password mechanism. For secure
transmission, it must be used in conjunction with TLS encryption, as
credentials are sent in plaintext otherwise.29
■ SCRAM (Salted Challenge Response Authentication Mechanism): A
more secure username/password approach that uses a challenge-
response protocol and stores password hashes in a salted form. This
protects against password sniffing and dictionary attacks.30
■ GSSAPI (Kerberos): Provides ticket-based authentication, offering
strong security guarantees but requiring a more complex Kerberos
infrastructure setup.29
■ OAUTHBEARER: Integrates with external identity providers by leveraging
OAuth tokens for authentication.32
● Authorization (ACLs): Access Control Lists (ACLs) define granular permissions,
specifying which users or applications are permitted to perform specific
operations (e.g., Read, Write, Create, Delete, Alter, Describe) on various Kafka
resources (e.g., topics, consumer groups, the cluster itself).22 ACLs are managed
using the kafka-acls.sh command-line tool.29 Adhering to the principle of least
privilege—granting only the minimum necessary permissions—is a critical best
practice for robust authorization.37
● Integration with Enterprise Security Systems: Kafka can be integrated with
existing enterprise security systems, such as LDAP or Active Directory, for
centralized user authentication. This is typically achieved by configuring Kafka to
use custom JAAS (Java Authentication and Authorization Service) LoginModules
in conjunction with SASL mechanisms.29

Monitoring
Comprehensive monitoring is paramount for maintaining the health, performance,
and reliability of a Kafka cluster.17
● Key Metrics:
○ Broker Health: Monitoring CPU usage, memory consumption, disk I/O, and
network throughput helps identify bottlenecks and ensure brokers can handle
message processing efficiently.17
○ Consumer Lag: This metric measures the difference between the latest
message offset in a partition and the last message offset processed by a
consumer. High consumer lag indicates that consumers are falling behind the
incoming data stream, leading to processing delays.17
○ Under-replicated Partitions: Kafka maintains replicas for fault tolerance. An
under-replicated partition signifies that not all replicas are in sync with the
leader, increasing the risk of data loss in case of a broker failure.17
○ Throughput: Tracking messages produced and consumed per second helps
gauge the overall performance and identify drops that might indicate network
congestion or broker overload.41
○ Partition Offset and Skew: Regularly checking these metrics ensures
balanced workload distribution across consumers and prevents uneven
processing.41
● Best Practices: Utilizing dedicated Kafka monitoring tools such as Confluent
Control Center, Datadog, Prometheus, and Grafana provides real-time
visualization, alerting, and detailed performance tracking from a centralized
dashboard.17 Setting up threshold-based alerts for critical metrics enables timely
detection and response to potential issues before they impact operations.
Optimizing partitioning strategies, regularly auditing Kafka logs, and conducting
load testing are also crucial practices for maintaining optimal performance and
scalability.41

Disaster Recovery (DR)


Kafka supports robust disaster recovery (DR) strategies, with replication being central
to its fault tolerance capabilities.6 Data is inherently replicated across multiple brokers
within a single Kafka cluster.6
● Cross-Datacenter Replication (CDCR): For more extensive DR, data can be
replicated across geographically dispersed data centers.6
○ Synchronous Replication: Involves producers waiting for acknowledgment
from all replicas across multiple datacenters before a write is considered
complete. While offering strong consistency, this approach introduces
significant latency and is generally impractical for datacenters separated by
more than approximately 100 kilometers due to fundamental network physics
limitations.43 It is suitable for scenarios with low transaction rates and strict
consistency requirements.
○ Asynchronous Replication (MirrorMaker): Kafka MirrorMaker 2 (MM2) is
the primary tool for asynchronous cross-cluster replication.42 MM2 decouples
source and target clusters, enabling global data distribution with an
acceptable replication lag (typically 2-4 seconds in production
environments).43 MM2 replicates not only topics but also consumer group
offsets, which is crucial for seamless consumer failover and migration of
applications between clusters. Its common use cases include disaster
recovery, geo-replication, and data migration.42
● DR Patterns:
○ Active-Passive: In this pattern, a passive datacenter remains idle during
normal operations and is activated only when the primary datacenter
experiences a failure. This approach is simpler to manage but typically results
in higher Recovery Time Objectives (RTO).43
○ Active-Active: Both datacenters handle production traffic simultaneously,
with data replicated between them to maintain global consistency. This
pattern is more complex to implement, requiring careful topic naming
strategies (e.g., prefixed replication for clear data lineage or identity
replication with mechanisms to prevent replication loops).43
● Practical Insights: Successful Kafka DR implementations require meticulous
planning and execution. This includes proper infrastructure sizing for MirrorMaker
nodes based on partition counts, careful configuration tuning (e.g., batch.size,
linger.ms, compression.type, acks) to optimize performance and reliability, and
continuous monitoring of critical metrics such as replication lag, message
throughput differential, consumer group offset translation, and network
utilization.42 Regular failover drills and comprehensive testing methodologies are
essential to validate DR readiness and ensure rapid recovery in real-world failure
scenarios.43

5. Conclusion: Strategic Application of Kafka


The choice between Apache Kafka and Amazon SQS is not a matter of one being
universally "better" than the other, but rather which technology is more appropriate
for specific architectural requirements.

Kafka is the ideal choice for high-volume, real-time data streaming, complex event
processing systems, and building robust data pipelines.1 Its log-based architecture
and configurable long-term data retention make it exceptionally strong for event
sourcing, real-time analytics, log aggregation, and scenarios demanding historical
data replay or multiple independent consumers of the same data stream.2 The rich
Kafka ecosystem, including Kafka Connect for data integration and Kafka Streams for
stream processing, further extends its capabilities, transforming it into a powerful
platform for building event-driven architectures.

Conversely, SQS remains superior for simpler queuing needs, particularly within the
AWS ecosystem, where ease of setup and minimal management overhead are
paramount.1 It excels at decoupling microservices, handling traffic spikes, and
asynchronous task processing where messages are transient and a traditional queue
model suffices.

From a Principal Engineer's perspective, the decision hinges on a nuanced


understanding of these trade-offs. Kafka offers unparalleled control, flexibility, and
power for event streaming and stateful processing, but this often comes with higher
operational complexity, especially if self-managed. SQS, on the other hand, provides
simplicity and managed convenience for basic queuing functionality. A deep
comprehension of Kafka's architectural components, its delivery semantics,
scalability mechanisms, and operational considerations is crucial for designing
resilient, scalable, and cost-effective distributed systems that precisely meet an
organization's evolving data processing needs.

Table 2: Kafka Delivery Semantics

Semantic Definition How Achieved How Achieved Trade-offs


(Producer) (Consumer)

At-Most-Once Message acks=0 (fire and Commit offset Lowest latency,


delivered once; forget), before potential data
may be lost on retries=0 20 processing 20 loss
failure.

At-Least-Once Message Producer retries Commit offset Higher latency,


delivered one or on failure after no data loss,
more times; no (default processing; potential
loss, but behavior) 20 applications duplicates
duplicates must be (requires
possible. idempotent 20 idempotency)

Exactly-Once Message Idempotent Consumer reads Highest latency,


delivered once producer from committed no data loss, no
and only once; (enable.idempot transactions duplicates
no loss, no ence=true, (isolation_level= (complex to
duplicates. acks=all, read_committed implement end-
retries=MAX_VA ); Offset to-end)
LUE); committed in
Transactional same
producer transaction as
(transactional.id processed data
) for atomic 20

writes 15

Works cited

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https://www.svix.com/resources/faq/kafka-vs-sqs/
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kafka-and-amazon-sqs-a-developers-guide-cm3bdumkz000q2bbz0g48grnk
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