This article will describe the difference between a shared/free and a dedicated plan in CloudKarafka. Hopefully you will also get an idea of what plan will work the best for you when starting out with our Apache Kafka service.

Shared server

The shared instance Developer Duck gives you 5 topics on a shared CloudKarafka cluster. This means one cluster serves multiple tenants.

Features on the shared plan

• Support: We provide 24/7 support. We've been providing hosting services for over four years and have operation experience from a huge range of customers.
• Certificate based authentication: We do allow connections via certificate based authentication.
• 5 topics: We guaranteed 5 isolated topics on free instances
• Manage topics: You have the option to create and delete your own topics

One thing to note when subscribing to a shared/free plan is that other users' actions might affect the performance of the whole server. If someone manages to use a lot of CPU in some way everyone will be affected. We are continuously working on improvements for the shared instances and we always strive towards offering better quality and service.

This has required us to add some limitations to the servers as described below:

Limits of shared/free cluster

• Max 5 topics: You will only be able to create and use 5 topics.
• Max 10MB data per topic: You are only allowed to have 10MB of data per topic.
• Max 28 days retention: Configurable retention period is max 5 days.

Dedicated clusters

Dedicated plans provide guaranteed isolation between instances. Every plan has a given number of Kafka nodes and Zookeeper nodes. Each cluster also have a given amount of cores, RAM and Disk.

SLA and support on dedicated plans: Our service-level agreement (SLA) guarantees at least 99.95% availability on all dedicated servers. CloudKafka will refund 50% of the cost for outages longer than that. Request of refund must be submitted in writing, within 30 days from the outage to which they refer, via email to contact@cloudkarafka.com

Features on dedicated plans

• Support: We provide 24/7 support. We've been providing hosting services for over four years and have operation experience from a huge range of customers.
• Critical support: For our dedicated plans, we provide 24/7 critical support with a 30-minutes maximum initial response time. For the plans Bouncing Bat and larger we can provide direct phone numbers if requested.
• Kafka manager enabled: Kafka Manager is a a tool for management of Apache Kafka.
• Certificate based authentication: We do allow connections via certificate based authentication.
• VPC Peering: You are able to peer your instance with your AWS VPC.
• Server metrics: Server metrics help you to measure performance metrics from your server.
• Kafka Log Stream: Apache Kafka log stream is showing the live log from Apache Kafka.

Comparison Table - Shared vs Dedicated plan

Please email us at contact@cloudkarafka.com if you have any suggestions or feedback.