Introducing Amazon MSK to Streamline Data flow in Real-Time – Part 1

Overview

In the digital era, there are trillions of Gigabytes of data that are generated in the world. Today, organizations have leveraged streaming services to maintain online data to maintain data integrity and move it from source to destination to be helpful in different real-time applications.

To resolve these problems, Apache Kafka was introduced in the community to streamline the data through its pipeline, which can be later used in multiple real-time applications. But concerning Apache Kafka, we need to maintain its server, and once the server is down, all the data will not be dumped into the destination.

To address the data’s availability and security, AWS came up with a service named Amazon MSK (Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka).

Many companies in the industry are using this service to process their real-time data to identify the KPIs in their business model.

What is Amazon MSK?

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) offers fully managed, Apache Kafka. Amazon MSK provisions your servers configure your Apache Kafka clusters, replaces servers when they fail, orchestrates server patches and upgrades, and modifies clusters for high availability. It also ensures data is durably stored and secured, sets up monitoring and alarms, and runs scaling to support load changes. You can spend time developing and running streaming event applications with a managed service.

Amazon MSK provides open-source, highly secure Apache Kafka clusters distributed across multiple Availability Zones (AZs), giving you resilient, highly available streaming storage. Amazon MSK is highly configurable, observable, and scalable, allowing for the flexibility and control needed for various use cases.

Top Features

• No servers to manage:

 Fully Managed: With a few clicks in the console, you can create a fully managed Apache Kafka cluster that follows Apache Kafka’s best practices or create your cluster using a custom configuration. Once you create your desired configuration, Amazon MSK automatically configures and manages your Apache Kafka cluster operations and Apache Zookeeper nodes.

Amazon MSK Serverless: MSK Serverless is a cluster type for Amazon MSK that makes it easy for you to run Apache Kafka clusters without having to manage to compute and storage capacity.

• Highly Available:

Default High-Availability: All clusters are distributed across multiple AZs (three is the default), are supported by Amazon MSK’s service-level agreement, and are also by automated systems that detect and respond to issues within-cluster infrastructure and Apache Kafka software. If a component fails, Amazon MSK automatically replaces it without downtime to your applications.

Data replication: Amazon MSK uses multi-AZ replication for high availability. Data replication is included at no additional cost. 

• Highly Secure:

 Private connectivity: One can easily configure its clusters under a VPC which will help maintain the private internet connection.

 Encryption at rest and in transit: We can also encrypt our data both in transit and at rest using different AWS services.

 Lowest Cost: Amazon MSK lets you get started for less than $2.50 daily. Customers typically pay between $0.05 and $0.07 per GB ingested, all-in, which can be as low as 1/13th the cost of other managed providers.

• Scalable:

Broker scaling: One can scale the number of brokers (agents) required for transferring the data from source to destination.

Cluster scaling: Amazon MSK automatically scales compute, and storage resources of your clusters in response to your application’s throughput needs.

 Automatic storage scaling: We can seamlessly scale up the amount of storage provisioned per broker to match storage requirement changes using the AWS Management Console or AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI).

• Deeply Integrated:
  

  Amazon MSK provides deep integration with other AWS services like KMS for encrypting data, and IAM policies for maintaining the actions which are going to be performed by the users. It enables who can handle the clusters to maintain the efficiency, CloudWatch service to monitor the clusters and many more services are deeply integrated, which helps to no data loss across the pipeline.

Conclusion

Amazon MSK is a highly available and scalable service offered by AWS to streamline data flow in real-time. It can also be used to integrate different real-time applications. Earlier it was very hectic to manage the servers responsible for facilitating flow. Still, using Amazon MSK, one can easily launch a cluster and maintain its source and destination connection, which AWS manages. Hence, it helps us integrate real-time streaming data with real-time applications.

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If you have any queries about Amazon MSK, Apache Kafka, or streamlining data flow, drop them in the comment section and I will get back to you quickly. Stay tuned for my next blog on a step-by-step guide for streamlining data in real-time.

FAQs:

1. Do Amazon MSK connectors integrate with third-party connectors?

Yes, Amazon MSK is leveraged with multiple third-party connectors like Debezium.

2. Is Amazon MSK compatible with various database engines?

Yes, It is compatible with multiple database engines like MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.

WRITTEN BY Arslan Eqbal