Benchmarking Kafka vs Chronicle for Microservices: which is 750 times faster?
Apache Kafka is a common choice for inter-service communication. Kafka facilitates the parallel processing of messages and is a good choice for log aggregation. Kafka claims to be low latency, high throughput . However, is Kafka fast enough for many microservices applications in the cloud? When I wrote Chronicle Queue Open Source my aim was to develop a messaging framework with microsecond latencies, and banks around the world have adopted it for use in their latency-sensitive trading systems. In this article, I will describe how Kafka does not scale in terms of throughput as easily as Chronicle Queue for microservices applications. As a teaser, I will show you this chart showing that Chronicle Queue is around 750 times faster even for lower throughput. Visualising delay as a distance In order to illustrate the difference, let me start with an analogy. Light travels through optic fibre and copper at about two thirds the speed of light in a vacuum, so to appreciate very short de...