Stephane Maarek is not impressed with AWS’s managed Kafka offering so far:
For me, the more people use Apache Kafka, the more business I get. As I teach Apache Kafka online on Udemy (links at https://kafka-tutorials.com/), the prospect of having an entire user base from AWS wanting to learn Apache Kafka is exciting! And as an Apache Kafka consultant, it’s always more fun to spend time deploying data pipelines than deploying infrastructure.
Unfortunately what AWS released today misses the mark. I think it’s reminiscent of managed services of open source software in AWS overall: they’re released early and lack features that I think should be MVP. In my opinion this will deter future users.
Based on Stephane’s reading, this is a product which should have sat in development for another 3-6 months to flesh out the features, upgrade the version of Kafka used, etc. Definitely read this before jumping on AWS MSK.