Azure Event Hub vs Kafka as a Service Broker

Question

I'm evaluating the use of Azure Event Hub vs Kafka as a Service Broker. I was hoping I would be able to create two local apps side by side, one that consumes messages using Kafka with the other one using Azure Event Hub. I've got a docker container set up which is a Kafka instance and I'm in the process of setting up Azure Event hub using my Azure account (as far as I know there's no other way to create a local/development instance for Azure Event Hub).

Does anyone have any information regarding the two that might be useful when comparing their features?

Answer 1

Can't add a comment directly, but the currently top rate answer has the line

Kafka can have multiple topics each Azure Event Hub is a single topic.

This is misleading as it makes it sound like you can't have multiple topics, which you can. As per https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/event-hubs/event-hubs-for-kafka-ecosystem-overview#kafka-and-event-hub-conceptual-mapping an "Event Hub" is a topic while an "Event Hub Namespace" is the Kafka cluster.

Answer 2

This decision usually is driven by a broader architectural choice if you are choosing azure as your iaas and paas solution then event hub provides a great integration within the azure ecosystem but if you don't want a vendor lock in kafka is better option.

Operationally also if you want fully managed service then with event hub it's out of the box but with kafka you also get this with confluent platform.

Maturity wise kafka is older and with large community you have a larger support.

Feature wise what kafka ecosystem provides azure ecosystem has those things but if you talk about only event hub then it lacks few features compared to kafka

I think this link can help you extend your understanding https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/event-hubs/event-hubs-for-kafka-ecosystem-overview