[arctek]

Isn't this somewhat better, at least when it fails it's in a single place?

As someone using Kafka, I'd like to know what the (good) alternatives are if you have suggestions.

[happymellon]

It really depends on what your application is.

Where I'm at, most of Kafka usage adds nothing of note and could be replaced with a rest service. It sounds good that Kafka makes everything execute in order, but honestly just making requests block does the same thing.

At least then I could autoscale, which Kafka prevents.

[NortySpock]

NATS JetStream seemed to support horizontal scaling (either hierarchical via leaf nodes or a flat RAFT quorum) and back pressure when I played with it.

I found it easy to get up and running, even as a RAFT cluster, but I have not tried to use JetStream mode heavily yet.