Apache Kafka is the proverbial runaway freight train of event-driven and Big Data-centric architectures, as well as this microservices thing that everyone seems to be rattling on about. Its tremendous power and flexibility have given it unstoppable momentum in both the industry and the open-source community; so much so that Kafka has become the default scan term of recruiters, along with other buzzwords such as ‘full-stack’, ‘micro frontends’ and ‘polyglot’. By some estimates, as much as 40% of Fortune 500 companies are using Kafka. Some might argue that these estimates are conservative.

This post is a reflection on my experience…