Amazon MSK versus AWS IoT Core

11 Dec 2024

Learn how Amazon MSK differs from AWS IoT Core.

	Amazon MSK	AWS IoT Core
Scaling	30 brokers per cluster; you need add/remove brokers and reassign partitions manually	not disclosed
Max. message size	configurable (default 1 MB)	128 KB
Persistence	forever (up to 16384 GiB per broker)	up to 1 hour
Replication	Multi-AZ (optional)	Multi-AZ
Order guarantee	within a partition	no
Delivery guarantee	up to the consumer	at least once / at most once
Pricing	per broker hour + provisioned storage	per message + connection duration
Protocols	Kafka protocol	MQTT, AWS Rest API
AWS Integrations	Lambda	Lambda, SQS, SNS, and many more
License	open source (Apache Kafka)	AWS only
Encryption at rest	yes	no
Encryption in transit	yes	yes

Further reading