[schmidtc]

Can anyone provide a legitimate criticism of Kafka? "It sucks, doesn't use it" isn't very helpful or productive. The closest thing I can find is http://engineering.onlive.com/2013/12/12/didnt-use-kafka/ which is more critical of zookeeper then anything else.

I'm evaluating Kafka for a new project and it seems to be a perfect fit. I've contemplated building something from scratch in python, as my reliability and performance demands are pretty minimal. However, it seems that a lot of thought went into Kafka's design and it's feature set is perfect match for my problem. Specifically the unlimited buffering, log compaction and the ability to replay logs from arbitrary offsets.

If there are any viable alternatives to Kafka what are they? Bonus points if the JVM isn't involved.