Comparing DMS for Kafka and Open-Source Kafka

DMS for Kafka is compatible with open-source Kafka and has customized and enhanced Kafka features. In addition to the advantages of open-source Kafka, DMS for Kafka provides more reliable and useful features.

**Table 1** Differences between DMS for Kafka and open-source Kafka
Category	Item	DMS for Kafka	Open-source Kafka
Ease of use	Readily available	Instances can be created intuitively within minutes and used right out of the box with visualized operations and real-time monitoring.	Preparing server resources and installing and configuring the software is time-consuming and prone to mistakes.
Ease of use	APIs	Instances can be managed easily by calling RESTful APIs.	N/A
Costs	On-demand use	Multiple specifications are available to suit different needs. The instance broker quantity and disk space can be expanded without downtime.	Expenses are incurred for setting up a message service and occupying underlying resources.
Costs	Fully managed	Services are readily available without requiring additional hardware resources or expenses.	Users must prepare hardware resources and set up the service by themselves, and bear high usage and maintenance costs.
Proven success	Mature	DMS has been deployed in many cloud products and proven successful in large e-commerce events. It is also used in the clouds of carrier-grade customers across the world, and meets strict carrier-grade reliability standards. DMS closely follows up with community updates to continuously fix known open-source vulnerabilities and add support for new features.	Using open-source software requires lengthy self-development and verification and has had few successful cases.
Proven success	Feature-rich	While maintaining 100% open-source compatibility, DMS further optimizes open-source code to improve performance and reliability, and provides message querying, and many other features.	Functionality is limited and requires self-development.
Reliability	Highly available	DMS supports cross-AZ deployment to improve reliability. In addition, automatic fault detection and alarms ensure reliable operations of key services.	High availability requires self-development or open-source code implementation, which are costly and cannot guarantee reliability.
	Simple O&M	O&M is entirely transparent to tenants with a full set of monitoring and alarm functions. O&M personnel will be informed of any exceptions, eliminating the need for 24/7 attending.	Users need to develop and optimize O&M functions, especially alarm notification functions. Otherwise, manual attendance is required.
	Secure	DMS uses VPC isolation, disk encryption, and SSL channel encryption.	Security must be hardened by users themselves.