Confluent Cloud vs. Amazon MSK: Apache Kafka® 비용 및 기능 비교

Yes, Confluent Cloud is more cost-effective than Amazon MSK because of cost savings from: 

• Reduced infrastructure costs: Confluent Cloud’s serverless, cloud-native architecture eliminates the need for over-provisioning that is common with MSK’s node-based pricing. Features like Infinite Storage and Tiered Storage decouple compute and storage, further reducing infrastructure spending. For example, SecurityScorecard saved over $1M in infrastructure and operational costs by migrating to Confluent Cloud

• Lower operational overhead: Offloading complex and time-consuming operational tasks—such as capacity management, scaling, and upgrades—to Confluent Cloud allows you to reallocate valuable engineering resources to innovation instead of infrastructure management. One customer reported they would have needed to hire at least 10 more people to manage Kafka themselves.

• Minimized downtime and risk: Confluent Cloud offers a 99.99% uptime SLA for production workloads. Compared to MSK (with a 99.9% SLA with exclusions for Kafka failures and customer configuration failures), Confluent’s SLA delivers higher reliability and reduces the substantial hidden costs associated with downtime.

Choosing Confluent Cloud can reduce your self-managed Kafka costs by 40-70%.

The main cost drivers of Confluent Cloud are:

• Usage based consumption: Confluent Cloud’s pay-as-you-go pricing is based on actual usage (e.g., throughput) rather than provisioned infrastructure. This pay-as-you-go model eliminates the need for over-provisioned, underutilized clusters that typically lead double the infrastructure costs for self-managed Kafka vs fully managed on Confluent.

• Managed horizontal scaling: Elastic Confluent Units for Kafka (eCKUs) are a Confluent Cloud’s unit of horizontal scalability for billing. eCKUs autoscale up and down based on workload. The cost includes the complete management of the platform, from infrastructure and scaling to monitoring and support, which is designed to reduce or eliminate the separate operational and support costs customers would otherwise incur.

The main cost drivers of Amazon MSK are:

• Higher infrastructure spend: MSK uses node-based pricing, requiring users to pay for provisioned compute and storage, which often leads to over-provisioning to handle peak loads. Networking, particularly cross-Availability Zone (cross-AZ) traffic, can also become a significant hidden cost, sometimes accounting for 80-90% of total infrastructure expenses.

• Self-managed operations and management: Since MSK is not a fully managed Kafka service, significant engineering resources are required for manual tasks like sizing, scaling, rebalancing partitions, patching, and monitoring. This includes the cost of hiring and retaining specialized Kafka talent.

• Custom development and maintenance: MSK requires significant custom platform development and maintenance, which can take 2+ years to bring to production and cost $3-5M or more in costs. Because MSK is a hosted service rather than a complete platform with essential components  included out-of-the-box, engineering teams must spend valuable time and resources building and maintaining their own solutions for developer tools, DevOps automation, infrastructure enhancements for reliability and disaster recovery, monitoring, integration, security controls, and governance.

• Unplanned downtime and higher business risk: MSK's 99.9% SLA excludes failures in the underlying Kafka software, as well as failures due to customer errors in configuration, leaving customers responsible for resolving failures that can easily turn into major outages. The risk of outages due to storage limitations, manual scaling errors, or unresolved bugs can lead to substantial hidden costs, including lost revenue and reputational damage.

Confluent Cloud pros and cons include:

• Pro: Confluent Cloud offers a complete, serverless experience that automates all operational aspects, from capacity planning and elastic scaling (to GBps+) to upgrades and monitoring.

• Pro: Confluent Cloud goes far beyond core Kafka, providing a rich ecosystem of 120+ connectors, serverless Flink for advanced stream processing, and an enterprise-grade Stream Governance suite.

• Pro: Confluent Cloud delivers significant cost savings through cost-efficient autoscaling and  usage-based consumption (which prevents overprovisioned and underutilized clusters and cuts infrastructure costs by 50%+), lowers TCO 40-70% compared to self-managed Kafka by eliminating $1M in development and operations costs over 3 years,  and with a 99.99% uptime SLA that reduces business risk.

• Con: For smaller teams, projects with predictable workloads, or organizations that already have in-house Kafka expertise, Confluent's fully managed service and advanced features may not present a clear upfront financial advantage.

MSK Serverless pros and cons include:

• Pro: MSK Serverless addresses some of MSK's operational challenges with pre-provisioning

• Pro: MSK Serverless can elastically scale to a given quota without the need for manual rebalancing.

• Pro: MSK Serverless offers unlimited storage (with a per-partition quota) without the manual configuration required by MSK Standard brokers.

• Con: MSK Serverless has a strict throughput limit of 200MBps ingress and 400MBps egress, with no upgrade path for workloads that exceed this.

• Con: MSK Serverless lack many mission-critical components, including a rich connector ecosystem, integrated stream processing (like Flink), and comprehensive, enterprise-grade security and governance tools.

• Con: MSK Serverless has the same weak 99.9% SLA as MSK Provisioned, which does not cover Kafka-related failures.

• Con: Like all MSK offerings, MSK Serverless has no multicloud support and is locked into the AWS ecosystem.

Confluent Cloud offers true elastic, automated scaling from 0 to GBps, while Amazon MSK's elastic scaling capabilities are more limited and manual:

• Confluent Cloud provides fully managed, automated, and elastic scaling. It can automatically scale clusters up and down from 0 to GBps+ to meet demand without interruption. Its cloud-native Kora engine uses an intelligent control plane and self-balancing algorithms to manage capacity, rebalance partitions, and eliminate the need for overprovisioning and underutilizing clusters to avoid outages. As a result, customers can save 50% or more on infrastructure costs.

• Standard clusters on MSK Provisioned require manual sizing, scaling, and rebalancing. While you can add brokers to scale up, you cannot easily scale down and are more likely to have a large number of overprovisioned clusters at any given time. Modifying storage capacity can take anywhere from 6 to 24 hours. Express clusters on MSK Provisioned offer faster scaling and rebalancing, but it is still a manual process.

• MSK Serverless offers some autoscaling but only within a lower quota limit (up to 200 MBps ingress and 400 MBps egress). There is no solution to upgrade beyond this quota without moving to a different offering.

Confluent Cloud can provision clusters in minutes, whereas provisioning an Amazon MSK cluster can take from 30 minutes to over an hour.

Yes, Confluent Cloud is architected to be more reliable and performant than Amazon MSK and significantly reduces the risk of unplanned downtime compared to MSK:

• Confluent's Kora engine provides native resilience with continuous monitoring, proactive replacement of degraded nodes, and automatic rebalancing to maintain availability without operator intervention. MSK lacks these native self-healing capabilities, requiring customers to manually identify and replace failed brokers.

• Confluent Cloud offers a 99.99% uptime SLA that covers all components, including Kafka-related failures. This translates to a maximum of 0.876 hours of downtime per year. Amazon MSK offers a 99.9% SLA (a maximum of 8.76 hours of downtime per year), but that SLA explicitly excludes failures caused by the underlying Apache Kafka or Zookeeper software, placing the burden of resolving these critical issues on the customer and significant increasing the actual maximum hours of downtime per year MSK customers may experience.

Confluent Cloud offers significantly stronger and more comprehensive developer tooling than Amazon MSK:

• Confluent Cloud provides a robust Terraform provider that allows developers to manage both control plane resources (like clusters and Schema Registry) and data plane resources (such as Topics and ACLs). This enables complete automation of infrastructure deployments as code. Amazon MSK offers more limited IaC capabilities, as its Terraform support can only manage control plane resources. Managing data plane resources requires building custom operators and processes.

• Confluent Cloud offers a rich set of APIs for point-and-click operations and automation. It also provides a user-friendly and intuitive cloud UI that allows developers to easily manage and monitor their Kafka clusters and data streams. MSK does not have a dedicated Kafka UI and developers must often build their own tools on top of MSK’s APIs. For example, MSK lacks a native REST proxy for non-Java clients, a feature available in Confluent.

• Confluent Cloud supports multi-language client development, providing client libraries for several non-Java languages including C/C++, Go, Python, and .NET. Users can generate the necessary configuration details (including cluster credentials and API keys) directly from the Confluent Cloud Console and paste them into client application code. Amazon MSK also supports non-Java clients but enabling them to interact with MSK requires some additional work when setting up and configuring the clients for authentication and authorization.

Yes, Confluent provides customers with guidance from the world's foremost Kafka experts. Confluent was founded by the original co-creators of Kafka, and its support and professional services teams have millions of hours of Kafka experience. MSK support is limited and does not have the same depth of Kafka-specific knowledge. 

Confluent Cloud provides 120+ pre-built connectors and 80+ fully managed connectors, enabling instant integration with a wide range of popular data sources and sinks both inside and outside the AWS ecosystem. In contrast, Amazon MSK has very limited connector support. It offers fewer than 10 direct or "half-supported" integrations and primarily provides just the underlying Connect infrastructure, requiring users to bring, manage, and maintain their own connectors. This results in additional operational burden and cost. In fact, Confluent offers instant, fully managed connectivity to more native AWS services than Amazon MSK does.

Confluent Cloud includes Stream Governance, a comprehensive, fully managed suite that provides Schema Registry, Data Portal, Stream Lineage, and Data Quality Rules. With features like broker-side schema validation and the ability to tag data containing personally identifiable information (PII), your data streams are discoverable, trustworthy, and secure. Amazon MSK integrates with AWS Glue Schema Registry but lacks a full suite of governance tools, such as schema validation, data lineage, or a data catalog.

Yes, Confluent Cloud supports multicloud deployments. It is designed for both multicloud and hybrid environments, whereas Amazon MSK is an AWS-only service. Confluent customers can use its fully managed Kafka service on all three major public clouds and use its Cluster Linking feature to replicate data across clouds.