[andreasklinger]

For those wondering (all imo and only best guess)

The biggest advantage of kafka is that all of the heroku marketplace all of a sudden becomes "plug and play"

Essentially it's the "backend data" equivalent of what segment does for "frontend data".

Example: What's the benefit of having a graphDB service in the marketplace if most people dont want to / cant invest engineering in keeping the data in (realtime) sync.

With kafka they can establish standards that all partners can adapt to, they will simply offer piping of all heroku postgres/redis changes.