[bonesss]

> Kafka is much, much more than just distributed pub/sub

In between 0% Kafka and 100% Kafka: Kafkas REST proxy gives a minimalistic API surface for using the system. Recreating that API in another language with a simpler backend is highly achievable...

My Kafka installation has a parallel relational backend that provides an onboarding story for smaller apps and groups, for example. It provides about 13% of Kafkas functionality and can't scale meaningfully, but provides baseline data streaming in a pinch and is API compatible with how we use Kafka most of the time.