TIBCO Messaging now supports Apache Kafka

TIBCO extends its open source credentials this month with commercial support and services for Apache Kafka as part of the firm’s branded Messaging product line.

Apache Kafka is a distributed open source publish-subscribe messaging system designed to replace traditional message brokers – as such, it can be classed as a stream-processing software platform. The project aims to provide a unified, high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds. It is written in the Scala and Java programming languages.

Let’s remember that short story novelist Franz Kafka himself was a fan of ‘systems for optimised writing’, which is why Apache Kafka was so named.

Already known as a company focused on data transfer and integration by data bus (TIBCO stands for The Information Bus COmpany), TIBCO Messaging – Apache Kafka Distribution will provide integration between other TIBCO Messaging components and Apache Kafka.

TIBCO says that Messaging customers can now bridge Apache Kafka applications to their existing investments in TIBCO FTL, TIBCO eFTL and TIBCO Enterprise Message Service technologies.

The company also announced the availability of MQTT broker capabilities within TIBCO Messaging, via the open source Eclipse Mosquitto project. MQTT is a popular messaging protocol widely used in IoT scenarios.

“Our announcement of support for Apache Kafka and Eclipse Mosquitto as first-class citizens is an important next step in the continued evolution of TIBCO Messaging and our efforts in open source, including Jaspersoft, Project Flogo and Project Mashling,” said Matt Quinn, chief operating officer, TIBCO. “By adopting popular open-source projects, we are supporting the evolving needs of our customers, while also sharing our messaging experience with the broader OSS community.”

This announcement is basically an offering to data architects and data developers to say that they can now select a single offering that provides a spectrum of capabilities, ranging from high-volume batch processing, to ultra-low-latency distribution, to streaming and IoT messaging.

This could be deployed in use cases such as applications that use data from the billions of device endpoints, including data streams from low power IoT devices and gateways; or perhaps event-driven architectures with loosely coupled microservices that rely on an ultra low-latency messaging infrastructure.

TIBCO Messaging is available for free as a community edition, allowing for production use up to 100 instances. Commercial subscriptions are, obviously, not free.