With the growing demand for scalable and high-performance messaging solutions, VMware Tanzu RabbitMQ 1.3 and Confluent Kafka have emerged as key players in event streaming and message queue technologies. A recent performance study on VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) highlights key improvements in Tanzu RabbitMQ and provides insights into Apache Kafka’s deployment on Kubernetes. Below, we summarize the key takeaways.
Key Technologies Evaluated
The study focused on the following technologies running on VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid:
• Tanzu RabbitMQ 1.3 – An enterprise-grade message broker with improvements in Quorum Queues and streaming capabilities.
• Confluent Kafka – A widely used distributed event streaming platform with support for large-scale real-time data processing.
• Strimzi – A Kubernetes operator for deploying Kafka clusters with ease.
Performance Highlights
Tanzu RabbitMQ 1.3: Significant Throughput Gains
• 30% higher throughput compared to previous versions, especially in Quorum Queue scenarios.
• Increased efficiency in handling messages of different sizes:
• Small messages (~55,634 messages/sec)
• Large messages (~15,334 messages/sec)
• RabbitMQ Streams reached up to 2.47 million messages/sec in a multi-stream setup.
Apache Kafka: High Throughput with Tuning
• Kafka was tested using 3 brokers, 12 partitions, and different replication settings.
• Achieved peak throughput of 149MB/sec with single-producer configurations.
• Replication overhead was noticeable, but asynchronous replication provided a balance between performance and durability.
• End-to-end message latency was 3ms for 1KB messages.
Architecture & Deployment Insights
• Both solutions were deployed on a 4-node VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid cluster.
• Hardware Setup:
• 24 vCPUs per node
• 72GB RAM per node
• 2TB storage per node
• Kafka’s Strimzi Operator was leveraged for automation and scaling.
• Tanzu RabbitMQ’s warm standby replication ensured high availability and disaster recovery.
Conclusion: Which One to Choose?
• Tanzu RabbitMQ 1.3 is ideal for low-latency message delivery, flexible routing, and high availability.
• Apache Kafka is better suited for event-driven architectures and large-scale real-time data streaming.
For businesses leveraging VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, both technologies offer powerful messaging and event streaming capabilities, each with distinct advantages depending on the workload.
