A Comparison of Event Sourcing Implementations: Using Apache Kafka Streams APIs and Microsoft Service Fabric Actor Services

The aim of this paper is to present, compare and contrast two different approaches that can be used to implement Event Sourcing which is at the core of modern reactive distributed applications. The paper commences with a brief overview of the relevant theoretical and implementational concepts, such as the event-driven architecture, Event Sourcing, CQRS, distributed logs and concurrency control. The following part of the paper presents the two proposed approaches: the first uses the Apache Kafka Streams API and the second uses the Microsoft Service Fabric Actor Services. The final part of the paper is devoted to the capabilities of the of the two approaches, focusing on the following aspects: communication mechanism, querying support, scalability, backpressure, and improvement potential.