Digital Ocean enters the arena of fully managed Kafka services with its new offering aimed at simplifying management and maintenance of the popular event streaming platform. Digital Ocean Kafka targets startups and SMBs by offering them an all-inclusive, flat-rate pricing model.
According to Digital Ocean product marketing manager Neel Chopra, the time spent configuring and maintaining Kafka themselves can often outweigh the cost savings of a self-managed version. Indeed, to configure a Kafka service you usually need to provision a multi-node cluster with many fine-tuned parameters. Management is made complex by the need for manual updating, securing, scaling, and logging.
