[010101010101]

> If you don't need what kafka offers, don't use it.

This is literally the point the author is making.

[uberduper]

It seems like their point was to criticize people for using new tech instead of hacking together unscalable solutions with their preferred database.

[blenderob]

That wasn't their point. Instead of posting snarky comments, please review the site guidelines:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

[EdwardDiego]

Which is crazy, because Kafka is like olllld compared to competing tech like Pulsar and RedPanda. I'm trying to remember what year I started using v0.8, it was probably mid-late 2010s?

[PeterCorless]

But in this case, it is like saying "You don't need a fuel truck. You can transport 9,000 gallons of gasoline between cities by gathering 9,000 1-gallon milk jugs and filling each, then getting 4,500 volunteers to each carry 2 gallons and walk the entire distance on foot."

In this case, you do just need a single fuel truck. That's what it was built for. Avoiding using a design-for-purpose tool to achieve the same result actually is wasteful. You don't need 288 cores to achieve 243,000 messages/second. You can do that kind of throughput with a Kafka-compatible service on a laptop.

[Disclosure: I work for Redpanda]

[ilkhan4]

I'll push the metaphor a bit: I think the point is that if you have a fleet of vehicles you want to fuel, go ahead and get a fuel truck and bite off on that expense. However, if you only have 1 or 2, a couple of jerry cans you probably already have + a pickup truck is probably sufficient.

[kragen]

Getting a 288-core machine might be easier than setting up Kafka; I'm guessing that it would be a couple of weeks of work to learn enough to install Kafka the first time. Installing Postgres is trivial.

[blenderob]

>> If you don't need what kafka offers, don't use it.

> This is literally the point the author is making.

Exactly! I just don't understand why HN invariably always tends to bubble up the most dismissive comments to the top that don't even engage with the actual subject matter of the article!