[admnor]

Hi. Author of the article/gist here. It was actually written in Spring of last year, I think. I've just updated it because, as people have said, many of the issues have been addressed one way or the other:

* The KafkaREST proxy makes life a little easier * librdkafka makes life a lot easier, especially when you can just download a thin wrapper around it for your chosen language * I am no longer working at the place that chose Kafka 0.8 following no testing at all for their use case, and refused to back down through months of hell both writing code and trying to keep clusters available * The people at Confluent have done a lot of good work since then, both on Kafka itself and on various auxiliary tools/products.

So yeah, I would probably look at Kafka again today if I needed that kind of functionality. Screw ZooKeeper though.