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.
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.
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?
MY problems are so special that my use of Kafka was perfect, but YOURS are trivial and you shouldn’t even consider Kafka.