Summary

I recently investigated the state of Python libraries for Kafka. This blogpost contains my findings.

Both PyKafka and confluent-kafka have mature implementations and are maintained by invested companies. Confluent-kafka is generally faster while PyKafka is arguably better designed and documented for Python usability.

Conda packages are now available for both. I hope to extend one or both to support asynchronous workloads with Tornado.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert in this space. I have no strong affiliation with any of these projects. This is a report based on my experience of the past few weeks. I don’t encourage anyone to draw conclusions from this work. I encourage people to investigate on their own.

Introduction

Apache Kafka is a common data system for streaming architectures. It manages rolling buffers of byte messages and provides a scalable mechanism to publish or subscribe to those buffers in real time. While Kafka was originally designed within the JVM space the fact that it only manages bytes makes it easy to access from native code systems like C/C++ and Python.

Python Options

Today there are three independent Kafka implementations in Python, two of which are optionally backed by a C implementation, librdkafka, for speed:

kafka-python: The first on the scene, a Pure Python Kafka client with robust documentation and an API that is fairly faithful to the original Java API. This implementation has the most stars on GitHub, the most active development team (by number of committers) but also lacks a connection to the fast C library. I’ll admit that I didn’t spend enough time on this project to judge it well because of this.

PyKafka: The second implementation chronologically. This library is maintained by Parse.ly a web analytics company that heavily uses both streaming systems and Python. PyKafka’s API is more creative and designed to follow common Python idioms rather than the Java API. PyKafka has both a pure Python implementation and connections to the low-level librdkafka C library for increased performance.

Confluent-kafka: Is the final implementation chronologically. It is maintained by Confluent, the primary for-profit company that supports and maintains Kafka. This library is the fastest, but also the least accessible from a Python perspective. This implementation is written in CPython extensions, and the documentation is minimal. However, if you are coming from the Java API then this is entirely consistent with that experience, so that documentation probably suffices.

Performance

Confluent-kafka message-consumption bandwidths are around 50% higher and message-production bandwidths are around 3x higher than PyKafka, both of which are significantly higher than kafka-python. I’m taking these numbers from this blogpost which gives benchmarks comparing the three libraries. The primary numeric results follow below:

Note: It’s worth noting that this blogpost was moving smallish 100 byte messages around. I would hope that Kafka would perform better (closer to network bandwidths) when messages are of a decent size.

Producer Throughput

time_in_seconds MBs/s Msgs/s confluent_kafka_producer 5.4 17 183000 pykafka_producer_rdkafka 16 6.1 64000 pykafka_producer 57 1.7 17000 python_kafka_producer 68 1.4 15000

Consumer Throughput

time_in_seconds MBs/s Msgs/s confluent_kafka_consumer 3.8 25 261000 pykafka_consumer_rdkafka 6.1 17 164000 pykafka_consumer 29 3.2 34000 python_kafka_consumer 26 3.6 38000

Note: I discovered this article on parsely/pykafka #559, which has good conversation about the three libraries.

I profiled PyKafka in these cases and it doesn’t appear that these code paths have yet been optimized. I expect that modest effort could close that gap considerably. This difference seems to be more from lack of interest than any hard design constraint.

It’s not clear how critical these speeds are. According to the PyKafka maintainers at Parse.ly they haven’t actually turned on the librdkafka optimizations in their internal pipelines, and are instead using the slow Pure Python implementation, which is apparently more than fast enough for common use. Getting messages out of Kafka just isn’t their bottleneck. It may be that these 250,000 messages/sec limits are not significant in most applications. I suspect that this matters more in bulk analysis workloads than in online applications.

Pythonic vs Java APIs

It took me a few times to get confluent-kafka to work. It wasn’t clear what information I needed to pass to the constructor to connect to Kafka and when I gave the wrong information I received no message that I had done anything incorrectly. Docstrings and documentation were both minimal. In contrast, PyKafka’s API and error messages quickly led me to correct behavior and I was up and running within a minute.

However, I persisted with confluent-kafka, found the right Java documentation, and eventually did get things up and running. Once this happened everything fell into place and I was able to easily build applications with Confluent-kafka that were both simple and fast.

Development experience

I would like to add asynchronous support to one or both of these libraries so that they can read or write data in a non-blocking fashion and play nicely with other asynchronous systems like Tornado or Asyncio. I started investigating this with both libraries on GitHub.

Developers

Both libraries have a maintainer who is somewhat responsive and whose time is funded by the parent company. Both maintainers seem active on a day-to-day basis and handle contributions from external developers.

Both libraries are fully active with a common pattern of a single main dev merging work from a number of less active developers. Distributions of commits over the last six months look similar:

confluent-kafka-python$ git shortlog -ns --since "six months ago" 38 Magnus Edenhill 5 Christos Trochalakis 4 Ewen Cheslack-Postava 1 Simon Wahlgren pykafka$ git shortlog -ns --since "six months ago" 52 Emmett Butler 23 Emmett J. Butler 20 Marc-Antoine Parent 18 Tanay Soni 5 messense 1 Erik Stephens 1 Jeff Widman 1 Prateek Shrivastava 1 aleatha 1 zpcui

Codebase

In regards to the codebases I found that PyKafka was easier to hack on for a few reasons:

Most of PyKafka is written in Python rather than C extensions, and so it is more accessible to a broader development base. I find that Python C extensions are not pleasant to work with, even if you are comfortable with C. PyKafka appears to be much more extensively tested. PyKafka actually spins up a local Kafka instance to do comprehensive integration tests while Confluent-kafka seems to only test API without actually running against a real Kakfa instance. For what it’s worth, PyKafka maintainers responded quickly to an issue on Tornado. Confluent-kafka maintainers still have not responded to a comment on an existing Tornado issue, even though that comment had signfiicnatly more content (a working prototype).

To be clear, no maintainer has any responsibility to answer my questions on github. They are likely busy with other things that are of more relevance to their particular mandate.

Conda packages

I’ve pushed/updated recipes for both packages on conda-forge. You can install them as follows:

conda install -c conda-forge pykafka # Linux, Mac, Windows conda install -c conda-forge python-confluent-kafka # Linux, Mac

In both cases this these are built against the fast librdkafka C library (except on Windows) and install that library as well.

Future plans

I’ve recently started work on streaming systems and pipelines for Dask, so I’ll probably continue to investigate this space. I’m still torn between the two implementations. There are strong reasons to use either of them.

Culturally I am drawn to Parse.ly’s PyKafka library. They’re clearly Python developers writing for Python users. However the costs of using a non-Pythonic system here just aren’t that large (Kafka’s API is small), and Confluent’s interests are more aligned with investing in Kafka long term than are Parse.ly’s.

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