Another analytics service you will see is Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka, also called Amazon MSK.
what is Kafka?
Well, Kafka is an alternative to Amazon Kinesis.
Kafka and Kinesis both allow you to stream data.
So, MSK is the ability to get a fully-managed Kafka cluster on AWS, and it allows you to create, update and delete clusters on the fly.
And MSK is going to create and manage Kafka broker nodes and Zookeeper broker nodes in your cluster for you and you deploy the cluster in your VPC, across multiple AZ, up to three for high availability.
You also have automatic recovery from common Kafka failures and the data is stored on EBS volumes for as long as you want.
It's very difficult to set up Apache Kafka and the fact you can just do one click and then deploy Kafka on AWS is great and this is the Amazon MSK service.
So on top of it, you have the option to use MSK Serverless, and this is that you run Apache Kafka on MSK, but this time you don't provision servers, you don't manage capacity, automatically MSK will provision resources and scale, compute and storage for you.
So what is Apache Kafka then?
Apache Kafka is a way for you to stream data and a Kafka cluster is made of multiple brokers and then you will have producers that will produce data and so they will have to ingest data from places, such as Kinesis, IoT RDS, et cetera, et cetera, and they will send the data directly into a Kafka topic that is going to be fully replicated into other brokers.
Now, this Kafka topic is having real-time streaming of data and consumers will pull from the topic to consume the data itself and then your consumer can do whatever he wants, process it or send it to various destinations, such as EMR, S3, SageMaker, Kinesis and RDS.
So the idea is that Kafka is quite similar to Kinesis, but there are differences to look out for.
So what are the differences between Kinesis Data Streams and Amazon MSK?
Well, in Kinesis Data Streams, you have one megabyte message limit, which is the default in Amazon MSK, but you can configure it for a higher message retention, for example, 10 megabytes.
You can have Data Streams with Shards in Kinesis Data Streams or in MSK, it's called Kafka Topics with Partitions, but the concept are sort of similar.
To scale Kinesis Data Stream, you need to do Shard Splitting and to scale it down Merging.
But in Amazon MSK to scale a topic, you can only add partitions.
You cannot remove partitions.
You have in-flight encryption for Kinesis data streams and then you have either plain text or TLS in-flight encryption for MSK.
You get at-risk encryption for both of these clusters and, in the exam level, this is enough.
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