Updated September 2022
Kafka’s primary role in many data architecture designs is ensuring that no data is lost. Databases can fail. Servers can fail. Applications can fail. But a well designed Kafka deployment should provide 24/7, reliable, fault-tolerant message collection and processing.
One way to ensure an expertly designed and managed Kafka deployment is to employ a Managed Kafka provider.
Any managed Kafka provider worth their price should include 24/7 monitoring, preventative maintenance, and an uptime guarantee. Again, what makes Kafka special is that it should be the workhorse of your data architectureーproviding fault-tolerant message collection and processing. In other words, 100% uptime.
Currently there are a few managed Kafka providers offering different uptime guarantees. At least one offers a 99.95% uptime guarantee. This is a good guarantee, but know that it comes with a possible 22 minutes of downtime in a 30-day month. At Dattell, we offer a 99.999% uptime guarantee with our Managed Kafka service, which reduces possible downtime to less than a minute.
Keep in mind, there are guarantees of uptime and what uptime looks like in practice. What’s the difference?
A guarantee provides assurances that the provider will reimburse or compensate the customer in some way if the downtime limit is exceeded for any given period of time. Sure, it is nice to be compensated if your service provider doesn’t hold up their end of the deal, but what’s even better is that they maintain the uptime you are paying them for each month.
At Dattell we take a personalized approach to managed services to ensure uptime, striving for 100% uptime for all of our customers, 24/7, 365 days a year. We found that keeping clear, consistent communication with our clients about their changing business and technical needs allows us to anticipate changes that need to be made to the Kafka deployment.
Further, with preventative maintenance and real-time monitoring, our Kafka engineers are constantly monitoring our customers’ deployments for any abnormal behavior to anticipate issues and make adjustments to maintain uptime at 100%.
Have questions about fully managed Kafka as a Service?