kafka-rest VS fast-data-dev

There is a REST API Producer for Kafka - https://github.com/confluentinc/kafka-rest - which can take HTTP API requests and put them into a Kafka topic for you.

When you say the Rest API, are you referring to the Confluent REST Proxy?

Maybe you're referring to kafka-rest and http based long polling? Nevertheless, the reason linked in the other comment is still the same.

I liked https://lenses.io/ Lots of capabilities but it's not free as I know.

Lenses

For Kafka Dev I use https://github.com/lensesio/fast-data-dev

Currently I'm using Lenses:https://lenses.io/ as UI tool, but while turning on kafka-start-server server.properties and launch the UI on localhost, it failed to connect:

Oh thats sad to hear ... lenses.io is so powerful I am not sure how I would have gotten by to this point without it!

In Addition to the more critical replys from others, why Kafka still makes sense imo: - you could organist everything with custom pipeline/services at your scale. The cost of maintaining those and keep the technology up to date is growing exponentially with every new Service. Kafka offers ansinge Plattform with a couple components which need to be kept up to date. - deploying, managing and monitoring those service is also a big task and does not come for free. - unless your using Kubernetes underneath, scaling is not easy with services. - peer to peer communications of microservices should be avoided because your building a „deathstar“-like architecture where everything is linked and effectively you’ll end up with a distributed monolith. A message broker or message queue helps to avoid this, Kafka is a good tool for that. - I heard that those aws Kafka replacements are not 100% Kafka as one might expect, you should be careful there. But confluent or other providers probably offer hosted solutions on aws too. - https://lenses.io/ helped us a lot when we started with Kafka to see how everything works together, create stream processor’s with sql and easily deploy Kafka connect workers. The tool costs money though but is worth it in the end in my opinion. (Disclaimer: I don’t work for confluent or lenses, we’re running open source Kafka with strimzi and lenses)

https://github.com/lensesio/fast-data-dev is a really cool option for a Kafka development environment based on docker and/or kubernetes.

Yes: - https://lenses.io/ (use the Lenses box, it’s free) - https://github.com/lensesio/fast-data-dev - https://github.com/provectus/kafka-ui