Confluent Platform or Solace?

Question

Our enterprise has both Solace and Confluent Platform capabilities.

While Solace also supports real-time streaming and an appliance based offering, why and when should an enterprise go to Confluent Platform ?

Answer 1

Answer from employee of Solace Corporation:

This is a great question. In fact, at Solace we are working on a more thorough blog/document to answer this exact question. We plan to put the details on the Solace site in the next week or so. I will post the URL when this is available.

Kafka was designed to be a batched (micro batch) log aggregation system. Its primary purpose was to deal with large volumes of data with a focus on data-at-rest. The default quality-of-service (QoS) is rather low, which allows a high throughput; at the expense of high latency and potential loss of data, out-of-order delivery and low security enforcement. While it is possible to use the thick client API to improve QoS with Kafka, it is at a great expense of performance, throughput and latency. Kafka also is generally restricted to a Publish/Subscribe Message Exchange Pattern (MEP).

Confluent adds some extensions to Apache Kafka that improve administration, but still is making use of the same Apache Kafka core and suffers from the same issues.

Solace was designed as a high performance, low latency, extremely reliable distributed event-driven messaging system that was targeted at data-in-motion. Solace supports all modern Message Exchange Patterns,(MEP) and natively supports industry standards and accepted specifications such as REST, WebSockets, AMQP, MQTT and JMS, without the requirement for adapters or gateways. Solace also supports a set of Solace/Kafka Source and Sink Connectors if you require movement of data between Solace and Confluent (Kafka). The Connectors make it easy to use Solace and Kafka together.

Solace also provides security and the highest level of QoS while maintaining predictable throughput and latency, even with extremely high client connection counts. This why Solace is used by Financial Institutions, Government Agencies, Manufactures, Connected Vehicle applications, etc. for their most stringent MEP requirements of no data loss, duplication and order of processing with 24/7/365 processing support. You cannot lose or duplicate multimillion dollar transactions! A recent quote from a financial client (RBC) discusses how their globally connected Solace event mesh reliably processes 65 billion messages a day.

If your requirement is a large volume of data-at-rest processing with a low QoS or security requirement, Confluent may be your choice. If you have high QoS requirements, stringent security, real-time data-in-motion processing with advanced MEP and 24/7/365 processing, Solace is you best choice. If you have both requirements, the Solace Connectors will provide bi-directional integration.