Kafka-Connect vs Filebeat & Logstash

Question

I'm looking to consume from Kafka and save data into Hadoop and Elasticsearch. I've seen 2 ways of doing this currently: using Filebeat to consume from Kafka and send it to ES and using Kafka-Connect framework. There is a Kafka-Connect-HDFS and Kafka-Connect-Elasticsearch module.

I'm not sure which one to use to send streaming data. Though I think that if I want at some point to take data from Kafka and place it into Cassandra I can use a Kafka-Connect module for that but no such feature exists for Filebeat.

Answer 1

Kafka Connect can handle streaming data and is a bit more flexible. If you are just going to elastic, Filebeat is a clean integration for log sources. However, if you are going from Kafka to a number of different sinks, Kafka Connect is probably what you want. I'd recommend checking out the connector hub to see some examples of open source connectors at your disposal currently http://www.confluent.io/product/connectors/