A managed Kafka service is a hosted Kafka offering in which a cloud provider provisions and operates the infrastructure. It shifts hardware maintenance, cluster configuration, monitoring, patching, and updates away from the customer, allowing teams to focus on application development. section 9.2.1
Evaluate the trade-offs against operating Kafka on premises:
- Reduce infrastructure workload, including provisioning, monitoring, security patching, and disaster-recovery operations. section 9.2.1
- Accept less control over broker configuration and Kafka version upgrades. section 9.2.1
- Account for higher costs at scale and possible vendor lock-in through proprietary features and integrations. section 9.2.1
Choosing a deployment model
A small company can use a managed service to avoid operating brokers and observability infrastructure. A large enterprise with dedicated Kafka engineers may choose on-premises Kafka to fine-tune performance and optimize costs. section 9.2.1
