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Comment by matsur | Hacker News Reader

To the author (or anyone else with experience): Any insight on why you guys chose Kafka + Secor over Kinesis?

I worked with Anuj at LinkedIn, so I'm thinking the most pedestrian answer is that Kafka works, and it's a familiar tool.

Thank you Jonathan!

As Jonathan mentioned, we made this decision around 9 months back and at that time Kinesis wasn't as mature and had less flexibility around retention period etc.

Kafka is very reliable (as I had seen it handling billions of events a day at LinkedIn) and has a huge open-source community around it. At IFTTT, we always prefer to use and contribute to open source ( http://engineering.ifttt.com/oss/2015/07/23/open-source/ ).

I'm assuming that you run Kafka within AWS. Much of the hardware requirements/suggestions I've seen for Kafka are all for non-virtualized environments. If you can get into it, could you share some details...

- What is the size of your Kafka cluster

- What instances types do you use?

- Do you use EBS or use ephemeral storage?

- How much do you over-provision to deal with instance loss?

- Any other gotchas/considerations?

Thanks!

Things might be different now that Kinesis Firehose has been announced. But Kinesis alone is not easier to manage than Kafka.

Amazon Kinesis is a great tool, the main problem is that it's relatively new while Kafka have been around for a few years already.

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