Kafka Streams vs Flink (or any other stream processing framework)

[kant kodali <ka...@gmail.com>]

Hi All,

I have read enough blogs from Confluent and others and also books that
tried to talk about the differences between the two and while it is great
to know those differences I hardly find them any useful when it comes to
decision making process of which one to pick since I don't see the clear
boundaries between Kafka streams vs Flink.

To be clear If I ask which one to pick? I am sure the answer will be
"depending on your use case". Well that's not what I intend to ask. All the
uses cases I came across till today can clearly be implemented using both
Kafka Streams or Flink (and I can give the benefit of doubt to someone who
probably must have seen better use cases) so the decision to pick one
becomes very subjective, biased and just a matter of convenience for
example "oh Flink would require additional deployment" or saying "Kafka is
meant for micro service architecture" and so on..Even with these examples I
don't see why we cannot implement with their counterpart therefore examples
like this would serve very little value for an Engineer's thought process.
For sure it will be a great sales talk.

So, What would be really useful to know is that what is possible with Flink
that is not possible or extremely hard to do with Kafka Streams for any use
case or Vice-versa ?  This way one would clearly know what the boundaries
are.

If Kafka Streams and Flink are in the same race that is fine too, and it
would be good to know that is the case so people can pick whatever they
like.

Thanks!