We do not shy away from learning about how our competitors are delivering their real-time data streaming solutions. We’d rather understand how they are crafting their products and services, and when relevant even partner with or augment what they deliver with Streamdata.io services. We feel pretty strongly that our Server-Sent Event (SSE) streaming solution is ideal for delivering on the last mile of data delivery, and can complement and augment most of what is being offered across the big data landscape today. While studying this playing field this week we found ourselves learning more about the Kafka solutions from LENSES.
According to their own description, “LENSES enables data preparation and processing while providing the insights the engineering teams require to build and operate data integration pipelines. As a real-time data management platform, it enhances the Apache Kafka cluster with enterprise-grade features like data flow topology graph, 360-data, security, access controls and auditing. Furthermore, it can integrate with Kubernetes for its SQL processors, but can also be deployed on Kubernetes.”
LENSES focuses on providing the following features:
– Allows for exploring data in motion
– Enables viewing, analysis, and processing of data
– Connects to any data store
– Provides 25+ connectors
– Comes with operational monitoring & alerts
– Provides fine-grained security
– Allows for multitenancy management
– Focuses on delivering data governance
– Provides a CLI for managing
– Provides REST & WebSocket APIs
– Provides client libraries for working with
LENSES provides users with a full-featured Docker deployment option which, “packs all you need to get going with Lenses, Stream-Reactor and Apache Kafka. The image runs the Lenses platform, of course, 1-Kafka Broker, 1 Zookeeper Node, Schema Registry and 1 Kafka Connect cluster – which is setup with more than 25 Kafka Connectors. It’s all pre-setup and you only need Docker installed.” Providing a pretty portable edition of Kafka that you can run anywhere, in any cloud environment, or locally if you are just developing on top of Kafka, and just getting started defining your data solution.
LENSES provides a pretty compelling blueprint for delivering streaming solutions with Kafka. We are definitely planning for more modularity, and deployability for our streaming and event-driven solutions as part of our roadmap. However, we also feel that many customers are going to be looking for a plug and play, software as a service (SaaS) solution, as well as a containerized on-premise edition like what LENSES offers. We feel pretty strongly about the simplicity of Streamdata.io, but we also understand where the big data space is evolving, and the role that Kafka is playing, so we don’t want to ignore moves like this from our competitors. We’ll be adding the relevant features to our roadmap, and will keep learning from the competition, and staying in tune with where the streaming data sector is headed–publishing stories along the way!
