zlacker

>>pul+(OP)
Must be something about Kafka to attract these kind of explanations. Another one few months back was a children's book on Kafka [1] . For me it just look like solution looking for actual problems.

I wonder if Kafka represents an existential angst in these Kubernetized Microservice times. Or is it more simply I am just too dumb to learn and use this shit correctly.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27541339

>>geodel+nkb
When you are wondering whether you might need Kafka, it is certain that you don't need it.

But there are times when you have a problem, and amongst the possible solutions is Kafka.

I've come across Kafkaesque problems only three times in the last seven years: a hosting platform that had to parse logs of over 700 WordPress sites for security and other businesslogic. Putting all events of a financial app backend into datalakes and filtering and parsing all openstreetmap changesets live.

>>berkes+yob
Not sure I agree. It seems as good a way as any to decouple systems, asynchronously exchange messages between services, get them into durable storage, exactly once processing, replay semantics etc. I think it should be on the table at least whenever we have two services needing to exchange data.

Maybe a few use cases could be switched out for direct API calls, but I think Kafka hits the sweet spot in many situations.

What alternatives would you be looking at?