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by kasey_junk 3709 days ago
Its a completely different use case. Many times people call Kafka a "message queue" but its not. It's a distributed log service. Its possible to build a message queue on top of a distributed log service but there are reasons not to.

Its better to think of Kafka as a database for events, not as a transport mechanism for those events.

As for being bloated, Kafka lives in a very empty space, that is it supports fully ordered events to all consumers (and it has good HA options). The only other tool that I've come across that gives you the same data guarantees is Kinesis and it requires AWS.

I've found that yes Kafka is complex, but its complex because its solving a complex problem, not because its bloated.

That said, if you want a non-ordered message queue, use NSQ instead of Kafka.

1 comments

Thanks for explanation. I didn't know those things.