[czinck]

I'd say the Python library I used was borderline unusable, we stopped using Kafka (it was just a trial period, wasn't rolled to production yet) because of limits in one of the most popular Python interfaces. The interface worked well enough, the API was good, but they didn't (and the bug tracker seemed to imply they wouldn't) support synchronizing reads across processes for the same group. What's the point in a distributed synchronized log if you can't do synchronized distributed reads of the log?

[emmett9001]

Sounds like old news, but if this is still an issue, PyKafka does allow balanced reads across a consumer group. https://github.com/parsely/pykafka

[czinck]

Yeah, it's no longer relevant for that project, but I like the ideas behind Kafka and will probably use it again so I'll look at PyKafka before I look at kafka-python in the future.