For Bill Bejeck - Why Kafka Streams over alternatives?

[Lanny Gilbert]

In your opinion, why should one choose Kafka Streams over other streaming alternatives? If, for example, I already have Kafka installed in my ecosystem to use for messaging, it's pretty straightforward to go ahead and use Kafka streams because I already have Kafka infrastructure, knowledge, etc.
But if I start from a greenfield, why would I choose Kafka Streams over alternatives?
Thanks!

[Bill Bejeck]

Hi Lanny,

Good question.  

First of all, you need Kafka to run Kafka Streams.  

Right now Kafka is the defacto standard for getting data into other streaming technologies like Spark and Flink.
But with those technologies, you need a separate cluster to get up and running.  
With Kafka Streams, it's just another application you deploy. You can run on a single machine or multiple machines.  
Best of all you can increase or decrease the number of machines you are running on while the application is running, no need to stop, add a node to the cluster and restart.

Thanks,
Bill