hi, I am looking for some comparison docs or pointers to clarify pros/cons of using kafka client library vs rest proxy. I understand use of rest proxy is great for generic producing/consuming records but am keen to know more about performance/feature limitation. I can’t see a single document on Confluent drawing up this comparison.
The client libraries are the native implementation of the Kafka protocol where the REST API is an http adapter layer. A performance comparison of the two would not be meaningful as the REST API has to adapt HTTP requests into Kafka protocol as well as negotiate the network for the HTTP<>Kafka Protocol layers.
The reasons you may choose to use the REST API is if a client binding is not available for a language you desire. Or possibly you’d like to produce and consume events using a lightweight approach over HTTP which could free you from maintaining the Kafka consumer/producer instances and lively network state.
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