Tracks/Track 17 — Technical Framework Comparisons/17-6
Track 17 — Technical Framework Comparisons

17-6: Kafka vs AWS EventBridge

Infra overhead, self-hosted pain, and event-driven architectures.

1 Lessons~45 min

🎯 What You'll Learn

  • ✓ Calculate self-hosted Kafka TCO
  • ✓ Measure Serverless Eventing constraints
  • ✓ Optimize message volume pricing
1

The Cost of Streaming Indecision

Kafka is a phenomenal tool for hyperscale data ingestion. It is also an operational nightmare that requires dedicated engineers just to maintain partition rebalancing. EventBridge is fully managed but introduces hard constraints on throughput and distinct per-event pricing.

Selecting the wrong broker leads to either massive infrastructure idle costs (Kafka) or catastrophic cloud billing surprises from rapid event loops (EventBridge).

Kafka Baseline TCO

The minimum cost of running MSK/Confluent with 3 instances.

~$1,500/mo min
EventBridge Tax

The variable cost of event routing.

$1.00 per 1M events
📝 Exercise

Map your ingestion volume. Decide between throughput-based pricing and event-based pricing based on payload size.

Execution Checklist

Action Items

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