[simonw]

You should read this: https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-wha... - it's long, but it's one of the most impactful essays I've read on software engineering in years.

[Jgrubb]

I'm not able to find the one that made the light bulb go on in my head, but Martin Kleppman gives some good conf talks around this topic. This one looks promising - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfJZ7duV_MM

[rakoo]

I liked this one [http://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the-database-inside-out...] a lot, because it highlights the strength of Kafka beyond a simple distributed message queue.

[koolba]

+1 regarding reading that essay on Kafka. The explanations, illustrations, evolution and use case are all well thought out.